Accompanying the fast rise of additive manufacturing techniques, such as the fused filament fabrication, the desire to use produced parts also in structurally loaded situations has increased rapidly over the course of the last few years. While the design possibilities in additive manufacturing open up large application fields, low mechanical properties, due to the complex processing itself often seem to put an abrupt end to aforementioned plans.
However, these limitations are not always purely based on the processing technique itself. With the fast improvement of machines, the peculiarities of the used material class itself seem to be overlooked as often as not. While it is possible to increase and optimize mechanical properties by dexterous choice of processing conditions, inherent material dependent idiosyncrasies, such as highly strain rate dependent properties, supercooling of the used polymers at the interfaces, and porosity induced notch-effects should also be considered in design.
The current presentation aims to elucidate the possibilities and pitfalls of this commonly used additive manufacturing technique, by demonstrating a wholesome view on the characterization of a structurally loaded component. This includes basic examinations, such as a simple design of experiment to optimize printing parameters, based on resulting interface strength, fracture mechanical characterization of deposition orientation dependent properties, testing of fatigue properties and finally also damage tolerant lifetime estimations, based on a combination of finite element analysis and established material laws.