Consistency analysis of mechanical properties of elements produced by FDM additive manufacturing technology

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology refers to the process of producing 3D objects by adding material in successive layers. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is one of the AM technologies where objects are built by adding layers of melted thermoplastic filament onto the printing surface. Mechanical properties of FDM printed part depend on many influencing factors such as material composition, extruding temperature, printing parameters and environment temperature. The aim of this study was to investigate consistency of mechanical properties of elements produced by FDM additive manufacturing technology. To do so, mechanical tensile and compression tests were conducted on ten samples using polylactic acid (PLA) and ten samples using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) thermoplastic material. Tensile tests were conducted using Shimadzu Compact Tabletop Testing Machine EZ-LX and the compression tests were done using VEB ZDM 5/91 testing machine. The ultimate tensile strength, strain, Young modulus and compression yield strength values were analyzed. The ABS thermoplastic material showed greater consistency in mechanical properties during tensile tests. Tensile strength values for PLA material varied between samples thus showing greater inconsistency in repeatability of mechanical properties. Compression tests, on the other hand, showed that PLA samples had greater consistency in mechanical properties compared to ABS samples.