Assessing the performance of additive manufacturing components

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a process that creates a 3D object from a digital design and is fabricated by adding material layer upon layer. The main advantage of AM is that it can fabricate the object with complicated geometry comparing with traditional manufacturing. Due to its adaptability, AM have a wide range of applications in aerospace, automotive, biomedical, energy and other industries. This work will assess the performance of the additive manufacturing demonstrators. The present work focused on one of the first AM techniques, Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF). In this work, the material properties of the components additively manufactured by FFF are evaluated in order to analyze their mechanical performance. To accurately identify the anisotropy induced in the material properties by the manufacturing process, the objects are partitioned according to their printing pattern into three zones: the contour, the cover and the inner structure. Thus, their respective mechanical properties are determined separately. Experimentally, uniaxial tensile tests on various PC-ABS 3D dog-bone samples are performed to represent the material of the contour and the cover. However, performing such experimental tests may be challenging. A geometrical relationship between the material properties at different orientation and the raw material is found. In the computational characterization, a homogenization technique using a Representative Volume Element (RVE) is adopted for the inner structure. After identifying the material properties of the contour, the cover and the inner structure, the computational model is validated. Experimental tests on PC-ABS 3D square cross-section demonstrators under pure bending loadings are realized. Moreover, the mechanical performance of the objects in the four demonstrators are obtained based on numerical simulation applying the above.