Polymer additive manufacturing of ASA structure: Influence of printing parameters on mechanical properties

Abstract

Polymer Additive Manufacturing (PAM) is a type of manufacturing technology which builds individual layers to form a three-dimensional part with complex geometry. The use of PAM components as a functional part is still insignificant when compared to injection molding components. This is due to marginal mechanical properties of Polymer Additive Manufactured components. The present work is an attempt to determine the mechanical properties of a specimen printed by a polymer material using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique. The effect of infill percentage and build direction on tensile strength and flexural strength of manufactured ASA parts is compared with similar injection molded parts in literature. Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate (ASA) material is chosen for the present work to do experiments. The part is designed in Creo parametric 4.0 and converted to .stl file format. The specimen is printed using a STRATASYS F-370 FDM machine. It can be concluded that the increase in infill percentage of the ASA material resulted in increased tensile strength along the print direction.