Investigating the Influence of Infill Density On the Short Fatigue Cycle of FDM-3D Printed Polilacide (PLA)- Based Material

Abstract

Several polymeric materials are produced by fused deposition modelling (FDM) an additive manufacturing process. Several researchers have shown that many parameters influence the mechanical property of 3D printed materials produced through FDM some of which include print orientation, print speed, extruding temperature and infill density. Biodegradable PLA-based materials have certain limitations which affect their daily application and one of them includes the Fatigue life of the material. This study looks at the influence of infill density on the fatigue strength of polymer-based materials produced by FDM. In this work, the author Perform a low cycle fatigue test with constant stress amplitude on samples manufactured by varying infill densities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) and observed the number of fatigue cycles to failure for each sample subjected to cyclic loading. However, it was found that FDM printed samples with high infill densities gives the highest number of fatigue cycle to failure and prove to be stronger than specimen with low infill densities with 100% infill being the strongest having a total of 6086 fatigue cycles to failure.This research will improve our knowledge in understanding the mechanism on how infill density influences the fatigue life of PLA-based materials produced by Fused-Deposition Modelling.