Parameteric Optimization of Tensile strength and flexural strength in 3-D Printed components

Abstract

Additive manufacturing the most widely and commonly used technologies of manufacturing. One of the methods of additive manufacturing is Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). FDM printed parts are being used in various application nowadays such as Aircraft parts, Automobile parts and many more. In every application, these parts have to undergo various mechanical stresses such tension, compression and flexural, etc., strength of these parts majorly depends on the various input parameters using which these parts are printed. So here we have selected some of the parameters which can have impact on the tension and flexural strength of the parts. To study the impact, we selected three parameters which are Layer Thickness, Infill Density, Feed rate and we used the material Polylactic Acid (PLA) to print the parts. Further using Taguchi's L9 algorithm we developed a DOE of Nine experiments which included various combination of those parameters, through that DOE parts were printed for both tension and Flexural strength test. Later with using those parts we performed two tests respectively for both Tension and Flexural Strength. Universal testing Machine (UTM) was used for both the tests. Finally, after performing experiments following result was obtained optimum combination of input parameters for Tension Strength is 0.2mm Layer Thickness, 75% Infill Density and 10mm/s Feed Rate which had highest value of S/N ratio 31.0290, while for the flexural optimum combination of parameters are 0.3mm Layer Thickness,50% Infill Density, 10mm/s Feed Rate whose value of S/N ratio is 38.8501.