Additive manufacturing, for example 3D printing, is gaining rapid momentum because of flexibility, speed and the space of creativity in manufacturing recent days. So is the incentive of using materials with environmentally more sustainable footprints, especially in the widely applicable fields like additive manufacturing. Our present works addresses the studies related to materials and designs at the intersection of two well sought phenomena: polymer bio-composite and additive manufacturing. Throughout the examination, we used in-house extruded filaments of polylactic acid (PLA) with/without the incorporation of the second most abundant biopolymer (found in nature), chitin, to create 3D printed structures via fused filament fabrication (FFF). The tuning of printing conditions (temperature and printing speed) along with the pre-treatment of filaments depicted that the resultant structures show significant shift in the context of both mechanism and extent of mechanical endurance of PLA-printed structures. Standard method of 3-point bending test along with concurrent high-speed imaging of failure incidence of the 3D printed materials were used for correlating the properties with the corresponding mechanisms. The materials were also used to study the auxetics aka low poisson’s ratio materials with/without the gradient infill for manufacturing engineered designs with inherent maneuvering capability under stress. We demonstrated that changing the pre-treatment of filaments, design and printing parameters prior and during the printing can be used to create mechanically durable and architecturally versatile useful 3D-printed structures using biomaterials. An additional approach of reducing the feature size dimensions of 3D printed parts will also be discussed during the presentation.

Study of 3D-printed design architectures prepared using biopolymers

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.