Fused Deposition Modeling Studies on Polylactic Acid_ Copper Composite Filament

Abstract

Fused deposition modeling has been widely used to build complicated shapes in particular for medical applications. The present work, a customized experimental setup is arranged to fabricate PLA-copper filament. To identify the suitable weight percentage of copper reinforcement in the PLA matrix, copper with the varied weight percentage of 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20 was added. The filament was prepared through the extrusion process, it was cold by the water and it is collected in a stack. The fabricated composite filament was cut at three different positions and it is grounded to the fine smooth polish surface before taking the 2D optical image. From the images, it can be inferred that the copper particles are evenly distributed and the filament is free from voids and other elements. To ensure the utilization property of the filament, it was printed at some constant FDM machining conditions. Density, elongation at break, compressive strength, tensile strength and flexural strength are measured to identify the suitable Copper weight percentage in the PLA matrix. Increase in the percentage of copper particle cause agglomerative, clustering, reduce the Ductile property, improved harness, and density of the composite filament. Besides adding of more than 20 % of reinforcement become a challenging task to get a continuous 3D composite filament. newlineBasic mechanical testing like tensile, compression and flexural test was executed on the printed sample. Increase of reinforcement progress to have slippery of copper particles and have reduced tensile and flexural strength of the samples. This action directly influences the elongation property of the composite sample. Nearly three hundred percent decrement was observed with the 4% and 20% of copper as reinforcement shows the effect of reinforcement in the PLA matrix. Compression strength of the samples increases with increase in reinforcement was due surface resist offered by reinforcement. newline