Fabrication and Characterisation of Aligned Discontinuous Carbon Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastics as Feedstock Material for Fused Filament Fabrication.

Lourens Blok,Benjamin Woods,Marco Longana

doi:10.3390/ma13204671

Abstract

In this work, aligned discontinuous fibre composite (ADFRC) tapes were developed and investigated as precursors for a novel 3D printing filament. ADFRCs have the potential to achieve mechanical performance comparable to continuous fibre reinforced composites, given sufficient fibre length and high level of alignment, and avoid many of the manufacturing difficulties associated with continuous fibres, e.g., wrinkling, bridging and corner radii constraints. Their potential use for fused filament fabrication (FFF) techniques was investigated here. An extensive down-selection process of thermoplastic matrices was performed, as matrix properties significantly impact both the processing and performance of the filament. This resulted in four candidate polymers (ABS, PLA, Nylon, PETG) which were used to manufacture ADFRC tapes with a Vf of 12.5% using the high performance discontinuous fibre (HiPerDiF) technology and an in-house developed continuous consolidation module. Tensile stiffness and strength up to 30 GPa and 400 MPa respectively were recorded, showing that a discontinuous fibre filament has the potential to compete with continuous fibre filaments.

Highlights

Carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRPs) are well known for their high specific mechanical properties and continue to attract considerable research interest
Fused filament fabrication (FFF), known as fused deposition modelling (FDM), is the most common LbL technique, where a part is build-up by the deposition of thermoplastic material through a nozzle, known as 3D printing
The goal was to select polymers that are suitable for future fibre reinforced FFF processing and as such the processing temperatures and the polymer viscosity were more important at this stage than performance criteria such as crystallinity and strength/stiffness

Summary

Introduction

Carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRPs) are well known for their high specific mechanical properties and continue to attract considerable research interest. The manufacturing of these composite materials, is expensive as a high level of expertise is required on top of significant investments for equipment [1]. Over the last few decades, rapid prototyping technologies have emerged using additive manufacturing to build up parts layer-by-layer (LbL) [2,4]. This allows direct fabrication of net-shape parts with new design freedom. A relatively new area of research is using fibre reinforced filament to create composite parts using a fully automated process [5,6,7]

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Conclusion