Effects of Printing Parameters on the Fatigue Behaviour of 3D-Printed ABS under Dynamic Thermo-Mechanical Loads

Abstract

Fused deposition modelling (FDM) is the most widely used additive manufacturing process in customised and low-volume production industries due to its safe, fast, effective operation, freedom of customisation, and cost-effectiveness. Many different thermoplastic polymer materials are used in FDM. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) is one of the most commonly used plastics owing to its low cost, high strength and temperature resistance. The fabricated FDM ABS parts commonly work under thermo-mechanical loads in actual practice. For producing FDM ABS components that show high fatigue performance, the 3D printing parameters must be effectively optimized. Hence, this study evaluated the bending fatigue performance for FDM ABS beams under different thermo-mechanical loading conditions with varying printing parameters, including building orientations, nozzle size, and layer thickness. The combination of three building orientations (0°, ±45°, and 90°), three nozzle sizes (0.4, 0.6, and 0.8 mm) and three-layer thicknesses (0.05, 0.1, and 0.15 mm) were tested at different environmental temperatures ranging from 50 to 70 °C. The study attempted to find the optimal combination of the printing parameters to achieve the best fatigue behaviour of the FDM ABS specimen. The experiential results showed that the specimen with 0° building orientation, 0.8 mm filament width, and 0.15 mm layer thickness vibrated for the longest time before the fracture at each temperature. Both a larger nozzle size and thicker layer height can increase the fatigue life. It was concluded that printing defects significantly decreased the fatigue life of the 3D-printed ABS beam.

Modelling and Investigation of Crack Growth for 3D-Printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) with Various Printing Parameters and Ambient Temperatures

“…Therefore, this paper enhanced our previous research [33], which studied the fatigue life of FDM ABS with different printing parameters and ambient temperatures, to further test and investigate the effect of raster orientation, nozzle size, and layer thickness on crack propagation and Paris' law for FDM ABS. Unlike the test for conventionally manufactured polymer, the dynamic thermo-mechanical loads are considered during tests to simulate the actual working conditions.…”

“…Like the previous work [33], the paper focused on three essential parameters: building orientation, layer thickness, and nozzle size. These parameters were tested under three different environment temperatures (50, 60, 70 • C).…”

“…It was assisted in a complete assessment of the experimental results. Moreover, to deliver excellent print quality and a typical setting range, the layer thickness and nozzle size were derived from the profile of the default setting [33].…”

“…The bending fatigue test of FDM polymers does not have a specific standard. Therefore, the geometry of the sample was selected as 150 × 10 × 3 mm 3 , as shown in Figure 4, which is the same as that used in previous research [33,34]. Therefore, the results for the present experiment and previous research can be compared.…”

“…The red ABS (Color code: RAL 3020) filament fabricated by the Ultimaker ® (Utrecht, The Netherlands) was selected as raw material (Filament details shown in Table 2) [33] because the ABS is the most used material for FDM and plastic zones can be clearly observed for red color material [33].…”