Interlaminar toughening approaches for additively manufactured liquid crystal polymers

Liquid crystalline polymers have recently attracted attention for their great tensile properties. However, their interlaminar fracture toughness is low. To solve this, toughening approaches inspired by Nature are applied, exploiting the shaping freedom of fused deposition modelling. Three approaches are studied: the matchstick approach, z...

Toolpath Generation for Fused Filament Fabrication of Functionally Graded Materials

The products in our day to day lives have different requirements in different regions of the product. One way of dealing with such spatially varying requirements is to divide the product into multiple parts and assign each part a different material. For example, the handle of a drill is often fitted with a rubbery material which gives it more...

Micro-scale computational analysis of Fused Filament Fabricated Materials: Experimentally-validated Finite Element Analyses of Representative Volume Elements

This work aims at predicting the elasto-plastic and fracture behavior of ABS polymers obtained by Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF). The strategy adopted is to characterize the microstructure of Representative Volume Elements (RVEs) of the material, as well as the mechanical properties of the polymeric filament used in the FFF process and then...