Production of carbon nanotube reinforced nanocomposite filaments for 3-D printers

Three-dimensional (3D) printing, the production technique has great interest in both academic and industrial areas, due to its significant advantages. 3D printing technology is now moving rapidly toward final product production, leaving prototype product production behind. At this point, thermoplastic filaments used as 3D printing supplies do not exhibit sufficient mechanical properties. The purpose of our thesis study is to improve the mechanical properties of filaments and to bring functionality to filaments with the help of nanoparticles. The nanoparticles are intended to be distributed into thermoplastic material with appropriate mixing methods to produce conductive filaments. The resulting nanocomposite filaments were converted into test sample form with 3-dimensional printers, and the characterisation tests were performed. The multi-walled carbon nanotube/acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (MWCNT/ABS) nanocomposite filaments containing 3, 5, and 10 wt% nanofiller were prepared by an extruder to use the fused deposition modeling (FDM) type three-dimensional (3D) printing technique. The functional MWCNT/ABS nanocomposites were converted into monofilament form by a special extrusion die. As a result of characterization tests, the optimum 3D printing temperature and loading ratio of MWCNT are determined as 250 °C and 10 wt%, respectively. This sample, which has the lowest volume resistivity as 2.13E7 ohm.cm. The presence of MWCNT in ABS matrix resulted in a significant improvement in elastic modulus and thermal properties, but a decrease in elongation at break and impact strength. In this study, it was revealed that the MWCNT nanofiller in ABS matrix can change the morphology of the 3D printed sample as foam-like porous structures, which possibly leads to reduced resistance to stress.