Influence of PMMA 3D Printing Geometries on the Mechanical Response

Abstract

This work presents a study regarding the mechanical characterization of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) patterned samples manufactured via material-extruded additive manufacturing. In recent years, literature about mechanical analysis in additive manufacturing has been growing increasingly, especially for material extrusion-based techniques. However, this trend surpasses the speed of information released by standard councils, existing no clear specifications for polymer characterization apart from conventional techniques. This issue has led to premature breakage as well as fracture not located in the constant cross-section region of samples. The main purpose of this present research is focused on the analysis of diverse modifications of the standard injection geometries to tackle the mentioned problems. Several printing methodologies were compared, changing slicing and geometrical parameters such as number of walls, and fillet radius. Then, the manufacturing of PMMA samples with a material extrusion printer took place to characterize both the material and the effective properties of the structures. With the information post-processed from tensile and compression tests, disparities were found between different geometrical designs for both elastic modulus and ultimate stress. Moreover, diverse location of fractures were observed for the studied geometries. The data obtained from the analysis was valuable to establish a proper protocol for further studies. The experiments suggest that for tensile tests the golden standard is selecting rectangular specimens since they do not induce premature breakage nor fracture outside of gauge length.