Production and characterization of polymer nanocomposite filaments for 3D printers

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is becoming an industrial manufacturing standard with wide-spreading of the related techniques in recent years. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a technique which is one of the most well known and most prevalent among other AM techniques. However, this technique has limited application area including model making and creating visual mock-ups because of the inadequate mechanical properties of the polymeric materials which are used as building materials (filament). The technique may widen its application areas by creating improved building materials. In this work nano/micro particle reinforced filaments with superior mechanical properties, compatible with commercial FDM devices, were produced successfully and used as building material in a commercial 3D printer. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) was chosen as matrix material while ZrB2, SiO2, Multi wall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Al particles were used as reinforcement materials. Characterization of the both filaments and 3D printed samples which had been produced by using these filaments was done in the context of this work. A co-rotating twin screw extruder was employed for production of the filaments. Tensile test and the surface roughness measurements were conducted on the filaments subsequently. After completing of the tensile test Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and Scanning electron microscope (SEM) examinations were conducted on the fractured surfaces of the test samples to validate presence of the reinforcement particles. For characterization of the 3D printed samples, tensile test and three-point bending tests were conducted firstly. After that, SEM investigations were conducted on the fractured surfaces for revealing underlying mechanisms. In addition to these, hardness-test was applied on the 3D printed samples' surfaces. Results show that reinforcement of ABS matrix with micro particle improves tensile-strain behavior of the 3D printed samples at least 82.5%. While nano particle reinforcement resulted with improvement up to 76% for tensile-strain value, strength of the 3D printed specimens shows at least 13.5% improvement for nano particle reinforcement.