Friction Induced Wear of Rapid Prototyping Generated Materials: A Review

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has been introduced in the early 80s and has gained importance as a manufacturing process ever since. Even though the inception of the implicated processes predominantly focused on prototyping purposes, during the last years rapid prototyping (RP) has emerged as a key enabling technology for the fabrication of highly customized, functionally gradient materials. This paper reviews friction-related wear phenomena and the corresponding deterioration mechanisms of RP-generated components as well as the potential of improving the implicated materials' wear resistance without significantly altering the process itself. The paper briefly introduces the concept of RP technologies and the implicated materials, as a premises to the process-dependent wear progression of the generated components for various degeneration scenarios (dry sliding, fretting, etc.).

Impact of 3D-printing structure on the tribological properties of polymers

“…This attitude could be interpreted due to the “running in state” where the specimen surface still rough. That leads to unbalanced contact between the 3D-printed layers and the steel counterpart (Tsouknidas, 2011). Afterwards, this surface will be polished during the sliding with the counterpart as a result of the wear.…”

3D printing for membrane separation, desalination and water treatment

“…Postprocessing is usually required [17]. Another common 3D printing technology is SLS additive manufacturing which is a type of powder bed fusion (PBF) process [22,25]. Figure 4b shows a schematic of the SLS printing process.…”

“…This process is repeated until the desired 3D object is completed. Many types of materials including polymers, ceramics, metals and composites may be used as printing material in this 3D printing technology [25][26][27]. It is possible to easily print complicated shapes with SLS as this process does not need structural support since the powder bed acts as support for the printed item [28,29].…”

“…Figure 4. Schematic representation of the most common 3D printing techniques: (a) Fused deposition modelling (FDM) (adapted from [25]); (b) selective laser sintering (SLS) (adapted from [25]), and; (c) stereolitography (SLA) (adapted from [22]). Stereolithography (SLA) is an additive manufacturing process wherein a part is created by selectively curing a (liquid) photosensitive thermoset polymer resin layer-by-layer using an ultraviolet (UV) laser beam, as shown in Figure 4c.…”

Production, Characterization, and Applications of Porous Materials

“…A significant limitation of most commercially available printing devices is, however, associated with high material and maintenance costs. Open source rapid prototyping has recently emerged as a cost efficient alternative and may help spreading the use of these technologies, even for composite materials [4].…”