Effect of Printing Parameters on Mechanical Behaviour of PLA-Flax Printed Structures by Fused Deposition Modelling.

Yassine Elias Belarbi,Sofiane Guessasma,Ameur El Amine Hamami,Ferhat Benmahiddine,Sofiane Belhabib

doi:10.3390/ma14195883

Abstract

Few studies have reported the performance of Polylactic acid (PLA) flax feedstock composite for additive manufacturing. In this work, we report a set of experiments conducted by fused filament technology on PLA and PLA-flax with the aim of drawing a clear picture of the potential of PLA-flax as a feedstock material. Nozzle and bed temperatures are both combined with the printing angle to investigate their influence on structural and mechanical properties. The study shows a low sensitivity of PLA-flax to process parameters compared to PLA. A varied balance between shearing and uniaxial deformation is found consistent with tensile results where filament crossing at −45/+45° provides the optimal load-bearing capabilities. However, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and high-speed camera recording shows a limiting reinforcing effect of flax fibre due to the presence of intra-filament porosity and a significant amount of fibre pull-out resulting from the tensile loading. These results suggest that the quality of the bond between PLA matrix and flax fibre, intra-filament porosity, and surface roughness should receive more attention as well as the need for more continuous fibre reinforcement in PLA filaments to optimise the performance of PLA-flax printed materials.

Highlights

Additive manufacturing or the commonly named technology 3D printing has already gained a mature state where several routes are available to process a variety of materials such as stereolithography [3], selective laser melting [4], and fused filament deposition [5]
Among the feedstock materials that are widely considered for printing using fused filament deposition technology, one can name polylactic acid (PLA) [6] and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) [7] as major feedstock materials
Using the leverage of printing and bed temperature only result benefit compared to Polylactic acid (PLA), where tensile properties are found less sensitive than expected

Summary

Introduction

Additive manufacturing or the commonly named technology 3D printing has already gained a mature state where several routes are available to process a variety of materials such as stereolithography [3], selective laser melting [4], and fused filament deposition [5]. Among the feedstock materials that are widely considered for printing using fused filament deposition technology, one can name polylactic acid (PLA) [6] and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) [7] as major feedstock materials. Polylactic acid (PLA) is one of the most used feedstock materials in fused filament technology. PLA is widely used in fused filament deposition because of its capacity for thermo-forming under relatively low thermal energy consumption. PLA exhibits a fast crystallisation when cooled down, which makes it ideal for PLA were the understanding of thermal kinetics (glass transition, crystallinity, melting) related to printing parameters [11,12] such as printing temperature and cooling rate [13,14]

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Conclusion