Purpose-This paper aims to present the influences of several production variables on the mechanical properties of specimens manufactured using fused deposition modeling (FDM) with polylactic acid (PLA) as a media and relate the practical and experimental implications of these as related to stiffness, strength, ductility and generalized loading. Design/methodology/approach-A two-factor-level Taguchi test matrix was defined to allow streamlined mechanical testing of several different fabrication settings using a reduced array of experiments. Specimens were manufactured and tested according to ASTM E8/D638 and E399/D5045 standards for tensile and fracture testing. After initial analysis of mechanical properties derived from mechanical tests, analysis of variance was used to infer optimized production variables for general use and for application/load-specific instances. Findings-Production variables are determined to yield optimized mechanical properties under tensile and fracture-type loading as related to orientation of loading and fabrication. Practical implications-The relation of production variables and their interactions and the manner in which they influence mechanical properties provide insight to the feasibility of using FDM for rapid manufacturing of components for experimental, commercial or consumer-level use. Originality/value-This paper is the first report of research on the characterization of the mechanical properties of PLA coupons manufactured using FDM by the Taguchi method. The investigation is relevant both in commercial and consumer-level aspects, given both the currently increasing utilization of 3D printers for component production and the viability of PLA as a renewable, biocompatible material for use in structural applications.
Polymer cold-drawing is a process in which tensile stress reduces the diameter of a drawn fibre (or thickness of a drawn film) and orients the polymeric chains. Cold-drawing has long been used in industrial applications, including the production of flexible fibres with high tensile strength such as polyester and nylon. However, cold-drawing of a composite structure has been less studied. Here we show that in a multimaterial fibre composed of a brittle core embedded in a ductile polymer cladding, cold-drawing results in a surprising phenomenon: controllable and sequential fragmentation of the core to produce uniformly sized rods along metres of fibre, rather than the expected random or chaotic fragmentation. These embedded structures arise from mechanical-geometric instabilities associated with 'neck' propagation. Embedded, structured multimaterial threads with complex transverse geometry are thus fragmented into a periodic train of rods held stationary in the polymer cladding. These rods can then be easily extracted via selective dissolution of the cladding, or can self-heal by thermal restoration to re-form the brittle thread. Our method is also applicable to composites with flat rather than cylindrical geometries, in which case cold-drawing leads to the break-up of an embedded or coated brittle film into narrow parallel strips that are aligned normally to the drawing axis. A range of materials was explored to establish the universality of this effect, including silicon, germanium, gold, glasses, silk, polystyrene, biodegradable polymers and ice. We observe, and verify through nonlinear finite-element simulations, a linear relationship between the smallest transverse scale and the longitudinal break-up period. These results may lead to the development of dynamical and thermoreversible camouflaging via a nanoscale Venetian-blind effect, and the fabrication of large-area structured surfaces that facilitate high-sensitivity bio-detection.
Biomimetic scale-covered substrates provide geometric tailorability via scale orientation, spacing and also interfacial properties of contact in various deformation modes. No work has investigated the effect of friction in twisting deformation of biomimetic scale-covered beams. In this work, we investigate the frictional effects in the biomimetic scale-covered structure by developing an analytical model verified by the finite element simulations. In this model, we consider dry (Coulomb) friction between rigid scales surfaces, and the substrate as the linear elastic rectangular beam. The obtained results show that the friction has a dual contribution on the system by advancing the locking mechanism due to change of mechanism from purely kinematic to interfacial behavior, and stiffening the twist response due to increase the engagement forces. We also discovered, by increasing the coefficient of friction using engineering scale surfaces to a critical coefficient, the system could reach to an instantaneous post-engagement locking. The developed model outlines analytical relationships between geometry, deformation, frictional force and kinematic energy, to design biomimetic scale-covered metamaterials for a wide range of application.
A continuum crystal plasticity model is used to simulate the material behavior of a directionally solidified Ni-base superalloy, DS GTD-111, in the longitudinal and transverse orientations. Isothermal uniaxial fatigue tests with hold times and creep tests are conducted at temperatures ranging from room temperature (RT) to 1038°C to characterize the deformation response. The constitutive model is implemented as a User MATerial subroutine (UMAT) in ABAQUS (2003, Hibbitt, Karlsson, and Sorensen, Inc., Providence, RI, v6.3) and a parameter estimation scheme is developed to obtain the material constants. Both in-phase and out-of-phase thermo-mechanical fatigue tests are conducted. A physically based model is developed for correlating crack initiation life based on the experimental life data and predictions are made using the crack initiation model.
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