EFFECT OF FIBER-LAYER POSITIONS ON MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF CARBON FIBER REINFORCED MATERIALS MANUFACTURED BY FUSED DEPOSITION MODELING

Abstract

In recent years, with the increasing needs from industry, various manufacturing methods have begun to be widely used. Additive manufacturing is one of these methods. These recent manufacturing methods, which allow the production of designed essential parts without any limitations, have also gained an advantageous position in industrial fields due to a variety of raw materials used. Additive manufacturing makes production possible using metal and polymer materials. In this research, continuous carbon fiber was used to strengthen the structure of a polymer material and printing was conducted with fused deposition modeling, which is one of the additive manufacturing methods. Tensile tests were performed on printed specimens and then the results were evaluated. Onyx was used as the polymer material and carbon fiber was used as the continuous fiber material. Comparisons were then made between the fiber specimens and onyx specimen that was printed without any fiber. It was found that the specimen made of onyx reached a tensile strength of 16 MPa, while by adding continuous carbon fiber reinforcement to the structure, a value of 58 MPa was obtained for the printed specimen. On the other hand, the highest tensile strength of 80.2 MPa was obtained by changing the layer location of the samples. This value is 38 % higher than the tensile strength of 58 MPa recorded for the sample that included also carbon fiber and was printed as a regular and symmetrical structure. In line with these results, it was observed that the addition of carbon fiber to the structure had a positive effect on the tensile strength. The carbon-fiber density also affected the tensile strength. Moreover, it was also observed that the tensile strength values improved with the change in the locations of the polymer and carbon-fiber layer.