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This study investigates the effects of process parameters on the quality of products fabricated by fused deposition modeling (FDM), such as surface roughness and tensile strength. Polylactic acid (PLA) samples were built on a FDM machine at various layer thicknesses, nozzle temperature and deposition head velocity. The effect of cooling the samples during the process was also considered. The experimental study was performed according to a mixed type Taguchi L16 orthogonal array. The effectiveness of each parameter was also discussed by an analysis of variance (ANOVA). The tensile strength results were compatible with the optical images of the fracture surfaces while the surface roughness results were compatible with the surface topography of the parts along the thickness. The two dominant quality characteristics were found to be layer thickness and deposition head velocity. Lower layer thickness values yielded higher tensile strength and lower surface roughness. Use of a cooling fan and nozzle temperature were found to be the least effective parameters. Finally, the results indicated that tensile strength and surface quality of the FDM samples improved about 25 %, and 12 %, respectively at optimal process conditions.

Polymer foams have wide application area due to their light weight, resistance to impact, high thermal insulation, and damping properties. Automotive, packing industry, electronic, aerospace, building construction, bedding, and medical applications are some of the ields that polymer foams have been used. However, depending on their cell structure-open or closed cell-polymer foams have diferent properties and diferent application areas. In this work, the most used thermoplastic foams with closed cells such as polypropylene, polyethylene, and polystyrene or polylactic acid have been focused. Their melt strength, degree of crystallinity for semi-crystalline ones, and viscosity have great importance on cell morphology. Cells in small diameter with high dense in polymer matrix are preferable. However, obtaining ine cells is not easy in each case, and it is still under investigation for some polymers. There are several ways to improve cell morphology, and one of them is addition of nanoparticle to the polymer. During foaming process, nanoparticles behave like nucleating agent that cells nucleate at the boundary between polymer and the nanoparticle. Besides, foaming agents contribute the homogenous dispersion of the nanoparticles in the polymer matrix, and this improves the properties of the polymer foams and generates multifunctional material as polymer nanocomposite foams.

This study presents the improvement of mechanical properties and cell viability of polylactic acid/halloysite nanotube (PLA/HNT) scaffolds that were fabricated by foam injection molding. In this regard, firstly PLA and HNT were compounded on a twin screw extruder by melt mixing method within the HNT loadings of 1, 3, 5 wt%. Then, neat PLA and PLA/HNT pellets were foam injected molded to obtain tensile test samples. The mechanical properties of the scaffolds were determined by tensile test and methyl-thiazol-tetrazolium technique was used for determination of cell viability. The results have shown that the scaffold with 3 wt% of HNT addition gave the highest mechanical strength among the fabricated scaffolds with 124.2% and 79.2% of increments in tensile strength and elongation, respectively. Also, 3 wt% of HNT demonstrated the highest cell viability among the obtained scaffolds due to its improved scaffold morphology. K E Y W O R D Scell viability, foam injection molding, halloysite nanotube, mechanical strength, polylactide, scaffold