INVESTIGATION ON THE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF PLA & ITS COMPOSITE FABRICATED THROUGH ADVANCED FUSION PLASTIC MODELLING
Author(s):
K.G. Jaya Christiyan1*, U. Chandrasekhar2, K. Venkateswarlu3
Affiliation(s):
1 M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore -560054.
2 Vel Tech Dr. RR & Dr. SR Technical University, Chennai-600062.
3 CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore-560017.
*Corresponding author email: [email protected]; Ph: +91 9008671957
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Advanced Fusion plastic modelling (AFPM) based rapid prototyping (RP) technique was emerged as one of the potential Technologies for serving numerous three-dimensional product for tool design purposes. Primarily, Poly Lactic Acid (PLA) and Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) are the key materials used for RP purposes. However, a PLA based composite was developed for RP applications. In this paper, an effort was made to prepare a PLA composite using bronze and cellulose as an additive. The objective of the proposed PLA composites is to performe the mechanical properties such as tensile and flexural strength at varied AFPM parameters like nozzle diameter, layer thicknesses and printing speeds. Three PLA composites including natural PLA and PLA with cellulose and bronze additives was prepared. Here, efforts were made on optimised the mechanical properties with the different composites and printing. The tensile and flexural strength of the PLA and its composites samples have been examined and with the nozzle diameter of 0.4 mm, layer thickness of 0.2 mm and the printing speed of 30 mm/s exhibited natural PLA has better tensile and flexural strength properties. The results also confirmed that the addition of bronze and Cellulose as additive exhibits moderate strength mechanical than the natural PLA but it has a pourous nature because of the gas prodused in the printing process.