Abstract
Three-dimensional printing of continuous carbon fiber/epoxy composites (CCF/EPCs) is an emerging additive manufacturing technology for fiber-reinforced polymer composites and has wide application prospects. However, the 3D printing parameters and their relationship with the mechanical properties of the final printed samples have not been fully investigated in a computational and quantifiable way. This paper presents a sensitivity analysis (SA)-based parameter optimization framework for the 3D printing of CCF/EPCs. A surrogate model for a process parameter–mechanical property relationship was established by support vector regression (SVR) analysis of the experimental data on flexural strength and flexural modulus under different process parameters. An SA was then performed on the SVR surrogate model to calculate the importance of each individual 3D printing parameter on the mechanical properties of the printed samples. Based on the SA results, the optimal 3D printing parameters and the corresponding flexural strength and flexural modulus of the printed samples were predicted and verified by experiments. The results showed that the proposed framework can serve as a high-accuracy tool to optimize the 3D printing parameters for the additive manufacturing of CCF/EPCs.
Highlights
Fiber-reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs) have been widely used in aerospace, transportation, and construction industries due to the fact of their low density, outstanding designability, and high strength and modulus [1,2]
It has been reported that the 3D printing of FRPCs has achieved remarkable milestones, from thermoplastics to thermosetting polymers and from short fibers to continuous fibers [11,12,13,14]
Purposes, as they are highlyvector competitive in vector machines have been widely used for classification
Summary
Fiber-reinforced polymer composites (FRPCs) have been widely used in aerospace, transportation, and construction industries due to the fact of their low density, outstanding designability, and high strength and modulus [1,2]. Short fibers were added into the thermoplastic matrix of 3D printing materials (in most cases, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or polylactic acid (PLA)) to increase the tensile and flexural strengths. Benefiting from the irreversible chemical bonds formed after curing, the tensile strength of the 3D printed SCF/EP samples with 35 wt% fiber content increased to 66.2 MPa from 56.9 MPa for the EP samples without SCF. The tensile and flexural strengths of the 3D printed CCF/PLA samples with 27 wt% fiber content increased significantly to 220 MPa and 335 MPa, respectively, from 60 MPa for the PLA samples without CCF. The detailed process parameters and their relationship with the mechanical properties of the final printed samples have not yet been discussed. An experiment with the simulated optimized process parameters was conducted to verify the proposed SA-based process optimization framework
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