A Brief Review on Three-Dimensional Printed Continuous Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites

Fiber reinforced composites offer exceptional directional mechanical properties, and the combination of their advantages with the capability of 3D printing has been resulted in many innovative research fronts. Three-dimensional printing technology is most widely used in automotive, aerospace, building, metal and alloy, electronics and biomedical industries. The most notable reason for the widespread acceptance of this technology is the ability to create intricate design at minimized process steps with the freedom to fabricate reinforcement as required. This review aims to summarize the methods and findings of research conducted on 3D-printed continous fiber reinforced composites by fused deposition modeling (FDM). It is shown that factors affecting the fabrication of these composites such as fiber orientation, fiber volume fraction and stacking sequence as well as, printing parameters such as infill density, infill pattern, nozzle speed, layer thickness, built orientation, nozzle and bed temperatures have a great effect on mechanical properties. In the present paper, a brief history of the three-dimensional printing of continous fiber reinforced composites, mechanism of embedding different continuous fibers into different plastics and their microstructural and mechanical properties including predicting models have been reviewed. In addition, future research is defined based on current constraints and challenges.