Evaluation of operational process parameters of polylactic acid filament extruder by quality and dynamic‐mechanical analysis measurements: A comparative study and classification

Abstract

AbstractIn this study, the operational conditions of a low‐cost in‐house‐built single screw filament extruder including operational parameters of extruder temperature (170–190°C) and screw speed (20–40 rpm) were evaluated in terms of the quality and dynamic‐mechanical properties of extruded PLA filaments. The designed experimental parameters were used to investigate the impact of operational parameters on filament diameter by Taguchi model where the predicted responses were evaluated. Results showed superior performance with R2 value of 0.9898. The measured filament diameters validated the predicted responses, and the error percentage was in the range of 0%–2.1%. Furthermore, in order to classify and distinguish filaments, we adept the artificial neural network (ANN) model classifier, and the measured dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) values at certain temperatures were taken into consideration where the classes they belonged to be determined. Results reveal successful classification accuracy of filaments in the range of 94.82%–99.98% depends on different cases of classification process.