Additive manufacturing has established itself in many areas, including medicine,
where personalisation is of particular interest. However, fundamental relationships
between the process and the resulting properties still need to be investigated before
it can become the new state of the art manufacturing process of medical prostheses
or implants. In the field of polymers, material extrusion-based additive manufacturing
is particularly widespread. In this process, a thermoplastic filament is melted and
deposited on a build platform forming a component layer by layer. Due to the layerby-
layer construction, numerous weld lines and cavities are introduced into the
material if the process parameters are not optimised. These areas represent defects
and can severely compromise the resulting mechanical properties of the
manufactured part. Since the mechanical integrity of implant materials is vital, the
identification of these defects is required. The localisation and qualification of defects
can be used to explain material failure [1] or even predict damage for a specific
loading scenario. Moreover, the number of possible loading scenarios for implant
materials is very high ranging from cyclic loading due to respiration to impact loading
in accidents. Additionally, the behaviour of polymeric materials can significantly
depend on temperature variations. Hence, temperature and strain-rate dependent
material data should be used in the design process of a specific implant [1].
REFERENCES
[1] S. Petersmann, M. Spoerk, W. Van de Steene, M. Üçal. J. Wiener, G. Pinter, F.
Arbeiter, Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 104,
103611, 2020.