Lightweight sandwich panels have been used in various industry sectors due to their unique properties as well as a high ratio of stiffness-to-weight and energy absorption. Three-dimensional (3D) printing process provides a unique opportunity to fabricate highly complex shapes of sandwich panels and also the application of smart materials, such as shape memory polymers, can create unique functionality for the 3D printed sandwich structure so that they can change their shape in response to external stimuli and give a new dimension to the printing process called four-dimensional (4D) printing. Polylactic acid is a biodegradable and compostable polymer with a good shape memory effect that can be printed easily with an inexpensive fused deposition modeling. This study investigated the effect of printing and activation parameters on the functionality, in particular shape recovery, of the deformed sandwich structure with honeycomb out-of-plane tailored core. The input parameters were the activation temperature, the nozzle temperature, and the printing velocity. The results showed that the optimum recovery ratio can be achieved using a higher activations and nozzle temperatures and lower printing speed.
Additive manufacturing has recently been introduced as a reliable technique for the fabrication of highly complex geometries that were not possible before. Due to the flexibility in the organization of material properties such as responsive elements in space, additive manufacturing is now a capable technology for the production of smart structures that can transform their geometry, for example, from a compact state to a deployed configuration. Among others, fused deposition modeling (FDM) can reliably be used to manufacture polymeric constructs with high resolution. PLA, the most popular polymer in FDM printing is a shape-memory polymer. Therefore, the manufacturing of shape-transforming constructs can be simplified to the construction of foldable products that can be programmed simply by applying mechanical forces. Origami can then be used as a simple platform in which the shape-transforming of a programmed construct is via the folding of material through the thinner sections (hinges). In our study, we used PLA and FDM additive manufacturing to fabricate foldable structures. We then investigated the effects of different parameters namely total thickness, layer height, nozzle temperature, and activation temperature on the shape recovery of the manually programmed origami structures. Additionally, we have shown that gripping, material-release, and blockage of gaps in engineering problems can be planned based on the unfolding of pyramid-like origami blocks.
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