Eray Şen

In the contemporary era of additive manufacturing technologies, the production of components with intricate geometries from a diverse array of materials, including polymers, ceramics, metals and composites, has become a reality. In particular, polymer materials, which are easily and inexpensively available, as well as meeting the desired strength values by optimizing the production parameters, can often be produced by material extrusion based fused deposition modelling. Polylactic acid, a polymer of choice in numerous fields, including biomedical and automotive applications, is of particular interest in this study. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of infill pattern and number of contours, which are production parameters, and deformation rate, which is a test parameter, on the tensile strength values of the related products in additive manufacturing products produced from the frequently used polylactic acid material. To this end, tensile test specimens were fabricated using three distinct infill patterns (zigzag, triangle and cubic) and three different contour numbers (2, 3 and 4). These specimens were then subjected to tensile testing at three different deformation rates (1, 5 and 25 mm/min). The resultant tensile strengths were obtained and the fracture surfaces were examined. The findings indicated that tensile strength values increased with an increase in the number of contours, that the effects of infill patterns varied depending on the deformation rate, and finally, that tensile strength values increased with increasing deformation rate.