Polyolefins are the largest class of commercially available synthetic polymers that are extensively used in a variety of applications from commodities to engineering owing to their low cost of production, good physico‐mechanical properties, light weight, good processability, and recyclability. Compared to conventional molding techniques, fused deposition modeling (FDM)‐based 3D printing is a smart manufacturing technology for thermoplastics due to its low cost, ease of production of complex geometrical parts, rapid prototyping, and scalable customization. FDM 3D printing can be an ideal manufacturing technology for polyolefins to manufacture various complex parts. However, FDM 3D‐printing of polyolefins is challenged bycritical printing problems like high warpage, dimensional inaccuracies, poor bed adhesion, and poor layer‐to‐layer adhesion. In this review, a fundamental understanding of polyolefins and their FDM 3D‐printing process is established, and the recent progress of FDM 3D printing of polyolefins is summarized. Furthermore, strategies to overcome warpage and to improve mechanical strength of the 3D‐printed polyolefins are provided. Finally, future prospectives of FDM 3D‐printing of polyolefins are critically discussed to inspire prospective research in this field. It is believed that this review article can be tremendously useful for research work related to FDM of polyolefin‐based materials.
Currently, material extrusion‐based additive manufacturing (MEAM) is an advanced fabrication technique for polymeric materials. However, MEAM feedstocks typically rely on amorphous thermoplastics and hence it suffers from limitation of compatible polymers. The current work reports the manufacturing of MEAM compatible new thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and styrene‐(ethylene‐butylene)‐styrene (SEBS) block copolymer blends which allow the designing of tailorable TPEs. Printability and mechanical properties of several ABS/SEBS (w/w) compositions were investigated. Interestingly, it was revealed that only 40 ABS/60 SEBS (w/w) blend possesses elastomeric properties in terms of strain at break (~550%) and tension set values (~10%). The effect of print layer thickness, orientation of printing, and infill degree on mechanical and TPE properties of the printed parts were studied theoretically by exploiting the Taguchi method. The infill degree has a significant influence on the mechanical performance whereas a slight effect was found by varying the layer thickness. Finally, the performance of the additive manufactured TPE were compared with conventional compression molded TPE specimens. As expected, lower values of ultimate tensile strength, Young's modulus, and strain at break of the additive manufactured sample were obtained as compared to the molded samples. However, no major variation could be found in the dynamic moduli, loss tangent, and absolute value of complex viscosity.
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