Investigating the mechanical properties of polymer composite materials made by 3D printing method

A composite structure is a non-uniform solid that consists of two or more different materials with different kinds that are mechanically bonded together. These structures have completely different chemical and physical properties and they merge together to make a substance that is not similar to any of these materials. In previous studies, the construction and investigation of sandwich structures of polymer materials were done with two materials with similar physical properties (two hard materials), but in this research, two polymers with completely different physical properties were combined and a new sandwich structure was made. This study aims to investigate and try to increase the mechanical performance of single-layer and multi-layer composite (sandwich) structures printed from hard (ABS) and soft (TPU) polymer materials and comparing these samples by preparing different composite structures from these polymers. The method of making polymer materials used in this research is the use of 3D printing technology (incremental layering). The results have been obtained in the form of laboratory tensile test and simulation in the Abaqus software environment. These results indicate that with the change of layers and materials, the amount of strain to failure of the composite samples has increased up to about 4 times. It should be noted that the construction of the tensile test samples in this project was done according to the standard of the American Association of Materials and Testing.