Fused deposition modeling has become the most common 3D printing technology in both the industry and the private sector, due to its easy application and low price. Although some companies provide parameter sets that are perfectly adapted for their machines and filaments, a great variety of materials that can be processed on arbitrary printers are also available. Usually, the operator has to figure out ideal printing parameters in order to achieve high-quality results. In this work, an approach is presented relating the conclusions of differential scanning calorimetry, including the melting and glass transition temperatures and the decomposition points, to the printout quality. To give an overview of the common materials and to correlate the behavior of the printing parameters, 16 different filaments categorized into groups of plastics without additives, metals and carbon, woods, and stones have been investigated. Heat towers have been printed with each filament, whereby the individual floors in 5 °C steps represent the nozzle temperatures and show features for direct comparison. As a main result, it is shown that the optimal printing quality is achieved with temperatures on the colder end of the range between melting and decomposition.

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In recent years additive manufacturing techniques for metals became more and more enhanced and a great variety of processable materials are available. Nevertheless, the quality of 3D-printed components is often not obvious, and, depending on the material, it is not known whether they are as resilient as conventionally manufactured parts. In this paper rolled tensile test samples made of 17-4PH are compared with additively manufactured ones. For this purpose, they were printed by Laser Powder Bed Fusion in three different orientations, 0°, 45°, and 90°, and subsequently tensile tested. The presented results contain mesoscopic images of the fracture surfaces, as well as an analysis of the metallographic microstructure. Further details about the measured hardness, the phase diagrams as well as an optimized heat treatment are described in detail. It is shown that specifically the heat treated specimens with a 45° orientation reaches the highest ultimate tensile stress, but possess a low ductility in comparison to the conventional components.