Properties of oriented carbon fiber/polyamide 12 composite parts fabricated by fused deposition modeling
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Nowadays, additive manufacturing (AM) has become one of the most attractive technologies for producing parts because of its potential to produce complex and personal parts, as well as remarkable advantage in time saving. Compared with the traditional manufacturing technology, AM technology has drawn more attention from manufacturing industry and academic communities. At present, the additive manufacturing, including inkjet printing, selective laser sintering (SLS) [1], electron beam melting (EBM) [2], [3], selective laser melting (SLM) [4], stereo lithography apparatus (SLA) [5], laminated object manufacturing (LOM) [6], [7], and fused deposition modeling (FDM) [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], have been developed and improved to form parts layer by layer. Inkjet printing has recently drawn significant attention by extending applications to the life sciences (also known as bio-printing) thanks to widespread availability and ease of use [15]. SLS has been used in polymer [16] and polymer composites [17], [18] processing, especially PA12 [19], [20], [21] and carbon fiber reinforced PA12 [22]. But the SLS further development has been constrained because of the limited applicable materials. Compared with SLS, EBM and SLM have been applied in more extensive material systems that covered the titanium alloys [23], copper matrix composites [24] and other metal powder [25], [26]. However, both EBM and SLM devices were very expensive as well as the powder materials. SLA and LOM have been successfully used for the fabrication of parts from ceramic tapes of SiC [27] and ZrO2 [28]. The research achievement of SLA and LOM has been applied to the field of medicine [29]. As the most widely used additive manufacturing technology in the field of application, FDM shows tremendous potential due to facile operation, low maintenance costs, supervision-free operation, and small size. Up to now, it has been applied in many fields including automobile [30], amusement, biomedical [31], household appliances, education [32], aircraft, and aerospace [33].
In a typical FDM process, the filament of plastic materials is fed into the liquefier head and then heated into melts by the feeding pressure generated from two rolls. After that, the molten plastic material will be extruded through a nozzle. However, up to now, only a few kinds of thermoplastic materials have been used as filaments in FDM, including acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) [8], [34], [35], [36], polylactide (PLA) [37], [38] and polyamide (PA) [9], [10], [39]. More importantly, those pure thermoplastic printed parts are usually lack of mechanical strength, which has largely limited their practical application. As one of the feasible methods, adding reinforced materials such as carbon fiber into plastic materials can form fiber reinforced plastic composites with high strength [40]. Carbon fiber not only offers the high stiffness, high strength and high Young's modulus, but also enhances the thermal conductivity. In the carbon fiber reinforced plastic composites, the carbon fiber can be used to bear the load. Meanwhile, the plastic matrix can be used to bind and protect the fiber and transfer the load to the carbon fibers [41].
Recently, many researchers have investigated the carbon fiber reinforced plastic composites with FDM [42], [43], [44], [45], [46]. Tekinalp et al. [42] compared the mechanical property of the carbon fiber reinforced ABS parts fabricated by compression molding (CM) and FDM. The results indicated that both strength and modulus of the parts fabricated by CM and FDM increased significantly with the increase of carbon fiber contents. Yang et al. [43] reported a new 3D printing technology for continuous carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites. The tensile strength and flexural strength of 10 wt% continuous carbon fiber/ABS composites were improved to 127 MPa and 147 MPa, respectively. But the interlaminar shear strength of the composites was very weak, resulting in the poor interface performance. Tian et al. [44] investigated the effects of carbon fiber contents and the process parameters on the performance of the samples fabricated by continuous carbon fiber reinforced PLA composites. Comparing with ABS and PLA, carbon fiber/PA composite has more excellent mechanical performances and extensive applications, for the reason, it is worth to research the application of carbon fiber/PA composite in FDM.
In this paper, different carbon fiber loadings PA12 composites were prepared into the form of filaments for FDM through melting extrusion. The thermal properties of composites were characterized by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMA). Three-point bending test, tensile test and impact test were conducted to characterize the mechanical performance of the samples. The results showed that the general performances of 10 wt% carbon fiber/PA12 composites sample fabricated by FDM were greatly enhanced. Furthermore, the SEM was used for observing the distribution and orientation behavior of carbon fibers in the composites and the interfaces between carbon fibers and thermoplastic matrix.
Section snippets
Materials
The matrix polymer polyamide 12 (Vestamid L1670) pellets were purchased from Evonik Degussa Co., Germany (density: 1.01 g/cm3, melting temperature: 178 °C). The continuous carbon fiber with the diameter of 6–7 μm was provided by Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academic of Science. The tensile strength and tensile modulus were 4.19 GPa and 307.98 GPa respectively.
Composites preparation
Carbon fiber/PA12 composites were prepared by melt compounding. The continuous carbon fiber was cut into
The dispersibility of carbon fibers in PA12 matrix
Fig. 2 exhibits the fracture surfaces of neat PA12 and PA12 composites with 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 wt% carbon fibers. It can be clearly observed that carbon fibers are dispersed uniformly in the PA12 matrix. During the melt compounding process, the great shear force is generated and long carbon fibers are cut into several segments and dispersed in the matrix when the coupled screws are rotated in the barrel.
Orientation behavior of carbon fibers in PA12 matrix
In order to verify the orientation feature of carbon fibers in the PA12 matrix, specimens (60 ×
Conclusion
The carbon fiber/PA12 composite filaments printable for FDM were fabricated by melting compounding successfully and the carbon fibers were dispersed homogenously in PA12 matrix. It was found that the crystallization peak temperature and the degradation temperature increased 3.46 °C and 7.50 °C respectively after adding 10 wt% carbon fiber. Compared with the pure PA12 parts fabricated by FDM, the addition of 10 wt% carbon fibers to the PA12 matrix can bring about an observable increase in tensile
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21573267, 11574331 and 11674335), the Jiangsu Key R & D program (BE2015104), and the program for Ningbo Municipal Science and Technology Innovative Research Team (2015B11002 and 2016B10005).
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