Abstract
In the last years, fiber-reinforced polymer composites have been under study for additive manufacturing. For this purpose, it is important to assess the behavior of these materials in terms of mechanical properties. The present experimental study evaluates the mechanical resistance of both PLA and carbon fiber reinforced PLA. The work used a full factorial Design of Experiments (108 tests) selecting as factors the infill density, infill pattern, material, number of perimeters and printing orientation. The main results highlight that the most influential factors on the tensile strength are both type of material and number of perimeters. In this study, the use of reinforcements did not improve the mechanical resistance attained by the corresponding virgin material. Particularly, for some selected specimens, the porosity measured in the fracture section is larger for the reinforced PLA specimens, so they showed a smaller cross-section.
Highlights
Though some precursors of additive manufacturing such as Joseph E
The present study shows an experimental investigation on the mechanical properties of 3D printed specimens, manufactured through Fused filament fabrication (FFF) technique, using both polylactic acid (PLA) and reinforced PLA with short carbon fibers
The experimental plan included the realization of 108 tensile strength tests
Summary
Though some precursors of additive manufacturing (commonly known as 3D printing) such as Joseph E. Pierre Alfred Leon Ciraud and Hideo Kodama are well known, it is Charles Hull, founder of 3D Systems, who is often identified as the 3D printing inventor in the 1980s due to his patent for the stereolithography process. Hull developed the STL file format for this manufacturing process, which currently remains the standard format in 3D printing slicers [9, 19, 32, 39]. Additive manufacturing market forecasts are positive about the growth of the market in the coming years, up to 2023/2025, as reviewed by Altıparmak et al [2] and Peng et al [36]. The technology is one of the key components of industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing due to its suitability for mass customization [28] and being applied in applications such as manufacturing, civil engineering, automotive engineering, biomedical engineering, food and clothing [44, 49]
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