Consistency analysis of mechanical properties of elements produced by FDM additive manufacturing technology

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology refers to the process of producing 3D objects by adding material insuccessive layers. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is one of the AM technologies where objects are builtby adding layers of melted thermoplastic filament onto the printing surface. Mechanical properties of FDMprinted part depend on many influencing factors such as material composition, extruding temperature,printing parameters and environment temperature.The aim of this study was to investigate consistency of mechanical properties of elements produced by FDMadditive manufacturing technology. To do so, mechanical tensile and compression tests were conducted onten samples using polylactic acid (PLA) and ten samples using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)thermoplastic material. Tensile tests were conducted using Shimadzu Compact Tabletop Testing MachineEZ-LX and the compression tests were done using VEB ZDM 5/91 testing machine. The ultimate tensilestrength, strain, Young modulus and compression yield strength values were analyzed. The ABSthermoplastic material showed greater consistency in mechanical properties during tensile tests. Tensilestrength values for PLA material varied between samples thus showing greater inconsistency in repeatabilityof mechanical properties. Compression tests, on the other hand, showed that PLA samples had greaterconsistency in mechanical properties compared to ABS samples.Keywords: additive manufacturing, FDM, mechanical properties