Effect of Printing Parameters of 3D Printed PLA Parts on Mechanical Properties

Abstract

Additive manufacturing significantly reduces the lead time of the product development cycle in the way of design trials and thus reduces delivery time to the market. The essence has been understood by many sectors including, education, manufacturing industries, automotive, medical, aerospace, consumer electronics, bio-medical and even fashion enthusiasts. It is used to prepare this PLA for the used plastics and landfills. By this way, it can reduce the plastics waste from the earth. Compare with ABS plastics, PLA plastics are cheaper. This disruptive technology going to the change the way of manufacturing goods and sets a new narrow path to the future industries. During usage of filament material, it’s got failure due to not enough quality printing because of not proper process parameters. Also, the printed part does not have good surface quality. So, the PLA material requires improved mechanical properties. The objective of this study is to create 3D printed parts with good quality with the optimized process parameters.

The selected process parameters are infill density (%), Nozzle temperature (º) and print orientation. Taguchi orthogonal array (L9) design method has been chosen for generating design of experiments. The samples are produced according to its ASTM standards. The specimens were tested for identifying the mechanical properties like tensile strength, compression strength and impact strength. From the results obtained from the tests, taking the mean values and conclude the better infill density, orientation and the nozzle temperature the PLA.