Abstract:The plasticized poly(vinyl alcohol) powders suitable for selective laser sintering (SLS) and the corresponding flexible sintered parts were successfully prepared by using the glycerol as plasticizer. The FT-4 powder rheometer, differential scanning calorimeter (DSC), laser scattering particle size analyzer, scanning electron microscope (SEM), universal material tester were used to characterize and investigate the structure and property of the modified poly(vinyl alcohol) powder and the corresponding sintered parts. The results show that the poly(vinyl alcohol) powder modified with 30% glycerin has good powder flowability and average particle size of 64 μm, which satisfies the requirements of selective laser sintering for particle size and powder flowability. The addition of glycerin effectively reduces the thermal processing temperature and the crystallinity of the poly(vinyl alcohol). This could hence improve the SLS processability of poly(vinyl alcohol) powder and avoids the problem of insufficient energy compensation and the occurrence of warping deformation for the sintered layer during sintering process under the high laser scanning speed. By optimizing the processing parameters, the sintered products show the good sintering accuracy with the error in the range of ±0.3 mm. When the laser energy density reaches 0.099 J/mm2, the sintered parts show good mechanical properties with tensile strength 1.6 MPa and compressive strength 3.5 MPa. In addition, the obtained poly(vinyl alcohol) sintered parts also exhibit a good elastic resilience property. When the compression degree is in the range of <30%, the elastic recovery rate can be higher than 80%.