Evaluation of the Effect of Infill Pattern on Mechanical Stregnth of Additively Manufactured Specimen

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has stepped down from the world of Sci-Fi into reality. Since its conception in the 1980s the technology has come a long way. May variants of the technology are now available to the consumer. With the advent of custom built (open source) Fused Deposition Modeling based printing technology Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), FDM/FFF has become the most used Additive Manufacturing technology. The effects of the different infill patterns of FDM/FFF on the mechanical properties of a specimen made from ABS are studied in this paper. It is shown that due to changes in internal structures, the tensile strength of the specimen changes. The study also investigate the effect of infill pattern on the build time of the specimen. Extensive testing yielded the optimal infill pattern for FDM/FFF. An open source Arduino based RepRap printer was used for the preparation of specimen and showed promising results for rapid prototyping of custom built parts to bear high loads. The study can help with the increase in the use of additive manufacturing for the manufacturing of mechanically functioning parts such as prosthetics