Chapter 1 - On quality characteristics of additively manufactured polypropylene (PP)

Abstract

Indeed, Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is one of the most popular technique and used in different fields, that is, automobile, aerospace, education institutes, medical, medicine, & healthcare sectors. Various kind of materials has been printed with the help of the FFF, the major one is acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polylactic acid (PLA), PVA, and polypropylene (PP). Undoubtedly, FFF suffers from poor dimensional accuracy, shrinkage, and wrap due to its input process parameters, that is, head scan speed (HSS), orientation (O), infill pattern (IP), infill density, shell width thickness (SWT), and layer thickness (LT). Many studies were available on ABS and PLA material but few researches were made to investigate the shrinkage and tensile strength of PP material with the FFF technique with a variety of process parameters. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to analyze the shrinkage and tensile strength of the PP material among different process parameters, that is, O, HSS, ID, IP, LT, and SWT. Results show that in the case of width and length high shrinkage was observed in build part 13 (∼0.32 mm and 0.77 mm, respectively, and high shrinkage in thickness was observed in build part 10 (∼0.37 mm). Likewise, low shrinkage in width, length, and thickness was observed in build part 1 ∼ 0.2, 0.11, and 0.3 mm, respectively. Similarly, it is cleared that TS of build part 11 (O = 90, LT = 0.25, HSS = 20, IP-1, ID-60, and SWT=1.6) ∼11.188 NN/mm² and build part 10 (O = 90, LT = 0.3, HSS = 60, IP-1, ID-60, and SWT = 1.6) having less TS ∼1.501 NN/mm² compared to other build parts. Overall, the study concludes that, for making lightweight products like packaging and more, this data may be used as a reference for the printing of PP for getting lesser shrinkage and high TS.