Designing and material testing of a thermoplastic-natural fibre composite material suitable for 3D printing
Fritz, Benjamin (2025)
2025
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025111928716
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025111928716
Tiivistelmä
Environmental challenges like the global warming as well as finite sources increase the demand of sustainable and reusable materials. Wood polymer composites used in the additive manufacturing in-dustry are a promising solution for reducing the amount of newly sourced materials. These types of composite materials bring challenges during the production that need to be overcome. Issues like bad adhesion between the materials and thus resulting worse material properties have to be resolved.
In this thesis an evaluation of a wood polymer composite material utilizing a newly introduced bio-waste side stream from a local boat company in Kokkola, Finland is done. Therefore, different formu-lations with varying biowaste, polymer and additive content are compounded. The thesis investigates how the raw materials affect the composite material regarding relevant parameters for the production like the melt flow index as well as their performance when used in form of tensile strength testing. Additionally, a thermogravimetric analysis is conducted to investigate how the thermal stability is af-fected when using wood polymer composites. Based on the results of these analyses an optimal com-position is chosen. This formulation is then used in further projects after this thesis for optimizing ma-terial property and machine parameters for compounding and 3D printing.
The test results show that with a lower concentration of biowaste and an increasing amount of addi-tive the processability as well as the melt flow behaviour are better. As the fibre diameter and length of the utilised biomaterial is very broad and the composition is not exactly known, conducting further research is recommended in order to optimize the properties of the composite material.
In this thesis an evaluation of a wood polymer composite material utilizing a newly introduced bio-waste side stream from a local boat company in Kokkola, Finland is done. Therefore, different formu-lations with varying biowaste, polymer and additive content are compounded. The thesis investigates how the raw materials affect the composite material regarding relevant parameters for the production like the melt flow index as well as their performance when used in form of tensile strength testing. Additionally, a thermogravimetric analysis is conducted to investigate how the thermal stability is af-fected when using wood polymer composites. Based on the results of these analyses an optimal com-position is chosen. This formulation is then used in further projects after this thesis for optimizing ma-terial property and machine parameters for compounding and 3D printing.
The test results show that with a lower concentration of biowaste and an increasing amount of addi-tive the processability as well as the melt flow behaviour are better. As the fibre diameter and length of the utilised biomaterial is very broad and the composition is not exactly known, conducting further research is recommended in order to optimize the properties of the composite material.