How do you decide what material is best for a manufactured part? This simple question has a complicated answer. An engineer must weigh criteria across several domains, including intended function, loading scenarios, work environment, production quantity, available manufacturing processes, and more. 3D printing is appropriate for some production applications, and less so for others. Here, we explore a new process for fabricating end-use parts: 3D printing composite materials.
We often write about the different tools, fixtures, and production parts that so many companies around the world use Markforged technology to fabricate. But it’s not just businesses that benefit from additive manufacturing.
Whether plastic or composite, FFF or CFF, 3D printed parts are strongest in planes parallel to the print bed — so the print orientation can literally make or break a part. Deposition-based 3D printers build parts in layers of plastic laid down on top of one another. Almost always, the molecular bonds forming the material extrusion itself are stronger than the adhesive bonds of one extrusion of plastic laid on another. Think of the layers like cracks or wood grain - they are slices of material stacked together, so it’s easy to pull those slices apart vertically, or push them past each other in shear.
Composite fibers boost specific properties of traditional 3D printed parts - usually strength, stiffness, heat resistance, and durability. This gives them a strength advantage over more traditional thermoplastics used in 3D printing like ABS or PLA, so the applications of 3d printing can expand with these additional materials and the properties they bring to the table.
Before getting to materials and settings that determine the strength of a 3D printed part, it is important to understand the physics and theory driving what aspects of a 3D printed part are important to its strength. In this article, we cover 3 concepts that lay the groundwork for strong 3D printed parts.
At a high level, the 3D printing process includes slicing a CAD file into discrete layers and then building that part layer by layer. In the FFF process, this happens by precisely extruding 3D printing materials in discrete tool paths that trace the outside of a layer and its celled infill.
The specifics of the format of the printer—its construction, what it’s made of, and the quality of its components— factor in to the quality and scale of the parts it can produce.
The Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) printing process is incredibly adaptable—however, it doesn’t work for every plastic. As a result of the tight constraints required to precisely extrude plastic out of a tiny nozzle, traditional plastics originally optimized for injection molding do not print. The plastics that are printable, however, cover a massive range of compositions, print constraints, and material properties. To find the right material, you need to match the requirements of your applications to the properties of the materials you can print with. In this article, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of thermoplastics.
Different 3D printing software programs can vary greatly, but all have the same core elements and parse a unified file type. There are four key steps to go from a part model to a 3D printed part: importing the part file from CAD into the software, turning that imported part file into a printable file, sending one or more of these files to your printer, and managing your printer(s) to maximize uptime and throughput.
As with any new piece of equipment, it can often be difficult to know how quickly it will pay itself off. Printers range from $200 (hobbyist printers) to $1m. However, there are plenty of printers in the mid-range ($3,500 to $100,000), which suits smaller companies with manufacturing needs. Here’s a guide to 3D printer cost and the different types of printers out there:
While there are many varieties in 3D printer technologies, there are seven most common types. All printing technologies build parts in discrete slices called layers.