Effects of printing parameters on the fracture toughness of 3D-printed polymer parts
Mohammad Reza Khosravani, Tamara Reinicke
Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM) has been introduced for production of prototypes, but it has been recently used for fabrication of end-use products. Therefore, the mechanical strength and structural integrity of 3D-printed parts have become of significant importance. AM also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, has been considered as a revolutionary manufacturing process that can create geometrically complex parts through a digital model. In the current study, we investigate effects of printing parameters on the fracture toughness of 3D-printed polymer parts. To this aim, polylactic acid (PLA) material was used to fabricate specimens based on the fused deposition modeling process. The specimens were printed with different orientations at different printing speeds. Particularly, the specimens were printed with 45°/-45° and 0°/90° filament orientations at printing speed of 20 mm/s and 80 mm/s. A series of compact tension tests was conducted and linear elastic fracture mechanics approach was used to determine the fracture toughness values for each group of specimen. The experimental results indicate that the lowest fracture load was belong to the specimens printed at the highest speed. The reported results of this study can be used for future design and next computational modeling of 3D-printed PLA parts.