Estimations of the effective Young's modulus of specimens prepared by fused filament fabrication.

Abstract

The elastic response of homogeneous isotropic materials is most commonly represented by their Young's modulus (E), but geometric variability associated with additive manufacturing results in materials that are neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Here we investigated methods to estimate the effective elastic modulus of samples fabricated by fused filament fabrication. We conducted finite element analysis (FEA) on printed samples based on material properties and CT-scanned geometries. The analysis revealed how the layer structure of a specimen altered the internal stress distribution and the resulting . We also investigated different empirical methods to estimate as guides. We envision the findings from our study can provide guidelines for modulus estimation of as-printed specimens, with the potential of applying to other extrusion-based additive manufacturing technologies.