| Abstract Scope |
Radio Frequency Additive Manufacturing (RFAM) is an emerging polymer sintering process that adapts RF heating, traditionally used to energize bulk material volumes, into a spatially controlled additive manufacturing platform. By selectively inkjet-depositing a lossy dopant into a nylon-12 powder-bed layerwise, RFAM enables patterned volumetric sintering driven by an RF field that couples preferentially with the dopant, melting surrounding powder in three dimensions simultaneously. Having established precise dopant patterning control through a custom-developed printer, the next frontier is computational process control. The RF field distribution is geometry-dependent, i.e., field concentration near corners and edges drives non-uniform energy deposition that varies with cross-sectional shape. HEATR (High-frequency Electrothermal Additive Thermal Resolver), a coupled electroquasistatic–transient thermal simulation framework, predicts and compensates for this behavior. HEATR informs simulation-driven strategies including functional dopant grading at the droplet scale, ILT-inspired input image pre-distortion, and rotational field averaging, establishing a computational foundation for geometry-agnostic, dimensionally faithful RFAM sintering. |