Effect of printing parameters on Mechanical Strength of Polymer-Metal composites Printed via FDM 3D printer

This paper presents an experimental study on the effects of printing parameters on the tensile strength of the polymer-metal composites printed via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique .In the recent years, 3D printer systems have been widely employed in various industries. FDM is one of the most widely used 3D printer systems worldwide due to its simplicity and lower cost. Although extensive research works have been carried out in the area of 3D printing, less efforts have been reported in developing new materials and their use in FDM process. The materials utilized in this study consisted of Cu particles in ABS polymeric matrix with a constant 25 wt.% of metal powder. The filament production line was implemented to accustom with the manufacturing process. The printing variables were selected as nozzle (orifice) diameter, layer height, fill pattern and nozzle temperature that were examined in three levels. Taguchi method was employed to find the optimal FDM process parameters. The main effect, signal-to- noise ratio and analysis of variance were employed to analyze the process parameters in order to achieve optimum tensile strength of the composite material specimens. Finally, the specimens were produce at the optimized parameters to confirm the tests and method.