A novel use of twisted continuous carbon fibers in additive manufacturing of composites

Abstract

3D printing of composites is one of the trending topics in the field of additive manufacturing. Several research papers on carbon fiber reinforced composites, used carbon fiber tows directly or sized carbon fibers as reinforcement for the composite, which is time consuming and not reliable as frequent clogging occurs. This paper presents a simple method by introducing the novel use of twisted carbon fiber filament and analyze its effect on the additive manufactured composites. The matrix material used is PLA. The commercially available 3D printers for printing continuous fibers, use double nozzle setups for printing the matrix and reinforcement separately in a layer by layer manner. However, there are no reports on the use of twisted continuous carbon fiber as filament and its effect on the printed parts. This paper uses twisted carbon fibers with single nozzle setup such that the material coming out of the nozzle will be ready to use CCF-PLA composite. Thus, the need of separate stacking of each layer of the matrix and fiber can be avoided. A separate path process planning has been done for printing the twisted carbon fibers in consideration of its continuity and the anisotropy. Standard mechanical tests are conducted, and the morphological study of the composite is done.