Abstract
Nowadays, additive manufacturing—also called 3D printing—represents a well-established technology in the field of the processing of various types of materials manufacturing products used in many industrial sectors. The most common type of 3D printing uses the fused filament fabrication (FFF) method, in which materials based on thermoplastics or elastomers are processed into filaments. Much effort was dedicated to improving the properties and processing of such printed filaments, and various types of inorganic and organic additives have been found to play a beneficial role. One of them, calcium carbonate (CaCO3), is standardly used as filler for the processing of polymeric materials. However, it is well-known from its different applications that CaCO3 crystals may represent particles of different morphologies and shapes that may have a crucial impact on the final properties of the resulting products. For this reason, three different synthetic polymorphs of CaCO3 (aragonite, calcite, and vaterite) and commercially available calcite powders were applied as fillers for the fabrication of polymeric filaments. Analysis of obtained data from different testing techniques has shown significant influence of filament properties depending on the type of applied CaCO3 polymorph. Aragonite particles showed a beneficial impact on the mechanical properties of produced filaments. The obtained results may help to fabricate products with enhanced properties using 3D printing FFF technology.
Highlights
The use of three-dimensional (3D) printing is nowadays frequently applied technology in various industry sectors, including civil engineering, biotechnology, and automotive [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
This work aimed to investigate the effect of different crystalline anhydrous polymorphs of CaCO3 —namely, aragonite, calcite, and vaterite—exhibiting different properties, such as morphology, on the fabrication of filaments composed of random polypropylene copolymer using the fused filament fabrication (FFF) technique
The presented study has shown the possibilities of the application of CaCO3 particles for the fabrication of polypropylene filaments employed for 3D printing
Summary
The use of three-dimensional (3D) printing is nowadays frequently applied technology in various industry sectors, including civil engineering, biotechnology, and automotive [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. The selection of a particular technique is essential to design products of required parameters at the desired cost of materials—the most frequently used additive technologies can be sorted according to their ascendant financial requirements as follows LOM < FFF < SLA < SLS < DMLS/SLM [10]. FFF is one of the most often used additive technology due to its low energy consumption and possibilities of printing products with complex shapes [11]. It belongs to so-called bottom-up methods that are producing one layer at a time, and the final 3D structured products are fabricated by gradual accumulations of these 2D layers [12]. Polylactic acid (PLA) [15,16,17,18,19], acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) [20,21,22,23,24], polyethylene terephthalate (PET) [25], polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PET-G) [26,27,28], polypropylene (PP) [29,30], and viscoelastic thermoplastic elastomers like thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) [31,32]
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