Fused Deposition Modelling of Natural Fibre/Polylactic Acid Composites

Abstract

Abstract:Fused deposition modelling is a simple additive manufacturing technology utilising fine filament extrusion of predominantly thermoplastic materials to build 3D objects layer by layer. This research explores the feasibility and the factors involved in using fused deposition modelling to produce natural fibre reinforced composite components. Uniform 3-mm filaments of both hemp and harakeke (Phormium tenax) in varying weight percentages within polylactic acid (PLA) polymer were successfully produced and used to print tensile test samples. Tensile test results supported harakeke to be a useful fibre in terms of mechanical properties achieved which surpassed the Young's modulus and tensile strength of plain PLA samples by 42.3% and 5.4%, respectively.

FDM 3D Printing of Polymers Containing Natural Fillers: A Review of their Mechanical Properties

“…Although there are quite a few studies on PLA-based biocomposites in FDM, the challenges brought by the material coupled to the ones coming from the processing method have forced a “trial and error” procedure. Interestingly, the available literature that does not make use of commercial filaments is significant [3,9,17,21,23,38,39,45,46,48,49,65,66,67,68], but has appeared only recently and the effects of processing parameters, additives formulation, patterning and geometrical features are not yet deeply explored. As can be seen from Table 3, plasticizers [21,45,48], toughening agents [39,65] and compatibilizers [39] have been studied.…”

“…From Table 3 it is evident that the majority of the papers concerned with the tensile properties of FDM printed biocomposites dealt with PLA-based filaments [3,9,12,21,22,24,38,39,45,49,67,68,69,72,73,74]. These possess average tensile strength ranging from 20 up to 40 MPa, Young’s moduli between 2 and 3 GPa and elongation at break between 1.5% and 10%.…”

“…Comparing unfilled printed specimens with reinforced ones, it can be often concluded that natural fibers have a negative influence on strength [3,4,9,18,19,38,39,56,67,68,69,73], while stiffness either increases slightly [8,13,18,19,44,68] or remains constant [3,38], as shown in Figure 4. The detrimental effect on strength is present in all materials, except for the polyolefins, where values increase with fiber content [8,13,44].…”

“…Mechanical properties of hemp/PLA [68], TMP/bioPE [13] and rice husk/ABS [19] as a function of biofiller content: ( a ) Strength and ( b ) stiffness.…”

On the Tensile Behaviour of Bio-Sourced 3D-Printed Structures from a Microstructural Perspective

“…σ S /σ S0 (%) = −74 + 0.32 × T P (C); R 2 = 0.96 (10) ε R /ε R0 (%) = −69 − 0.07 × T P (C); R 2 = 1.00 (11) Figure 10 compares the mechanical results of the present study with data reported from the literature and from the own authors experiments on different feedstock materials [8,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. The performance of PLA is found among the top ranked materials.…”