Purpose Composites combining two or more different materials with different physical and chemical properties allow for tailoring mechanical and other characteristics of the resulting multi-material system. In relation to fiber-reinforced plastic composites, combinations of textile materials with 3D printed polymers result in different mechanical properties. While the tensile strength of the multi-material system is increased compared to the pure 3D printed material, the elasticity of the polymer layer can be retained to a certain degree, as the textile material is not completely immersed in the polymer. Instead, an interface layer is built in which both materials interpenetrate to a certain degree. The purpose of this study is to investigate the adhesion between both materials at this interface. Design/methodology/approach This paper gives an overview of the parameters affecting the interface layer. It shows that both the printing material and the textile substrate influence the adhesion between both materials due to viscosity during printing, thickness and pore sizes, respectively. While some material combinations build strong form-locking connections, others can easily be delaminated. Findings Depending on both materials, significantly different adhesion values can be found in such 3D printed composites. Practical implications This makes some combinations very well suitable for building composites with novel mechanical properties, while other suffer of insufficient connections. Originality/value For the first time, the dependence of the polymer-textile adhesion force was evaluated according to the distance between both compound partners. It was shown that this value is of crucial interest and must thus be taken into account when producing printed polymer-textile composites.

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Electrospinning allows producing fine polymer fibers with diameters in the range of several hundred nanometers up to some micrometers. While a large amount of polymers necessitates spinning either from melt or from solutions which are hazardous to health and environment, biopolymers and some other materials are water-soluble and thus can be spun from pure water or similar uncritical (i.e. non-toxic, non-hazardous) solutions. Electrospinning from aqueous solutions, however, is from the technological point of view often more complicated than using other solvents, since water evaporates slower and requires careful designing of the spinning process parameters. This article gives an overview of the influence of spinning and material parameters on nanomats produced from poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO, also known as poly(ethylene glycol), PEG), depicting which parameters are suitable for needleless electrospinning, opposite to parameters found in the literature for nanospinning with a needle.