Failure Assessment of Additively Manufacturing PLA Specimens Using an Energy-Based Criterion

Abstract

The field of additive manufacturing (AM) has in the last decades become more and more relevant. Rapid prototyping is a cheap and quick way of creating physical 3D-models of complex geometries. In this thesis, failure of polyactide (PLA) specimens created using fused deposition modelling (FDM) has been studied using an energy-based approach. PLA is a polymer created from biomass. It is therefore biodegradable and popular in the field of medical equipment. Failure loads of 12 different notched specimens has been predicted using the averaged strain energy density (ASED) obtained from numerical analyses over a control radius in the vicinity of the notch. The results indicate a good correlation between the experimental and analytical results, providing results which for the most part stay within a scatter band of +/- 20%.