Calculating Filament Feed in the Fused Deposition Modeling Process to Correctly Print Continuous Fiber Composites in Curved Paths

Behnam Akhoundi; Mojtaba Nabipour; Faramarz Hajami; Shahab S Band; Amir Mosavi

doi:10.3390/ma13204480

Calculating Filament Feed in the Fused Deposition Modeling Process to Correctly Print Continuous Fiber Composites in Curved Paths

Materials (Basel). 2020 Oct 9;13(20):4480. doi: 10.3390/ma13204480.

Authors

Behnam Akhoundi¹, Mojtaba Nabipour¹, Faramarz Hajami², Shahab S Band^{3

4}, Amir Mosavi^{5

6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Additive Manufacturing Laboratory, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran 14115-143, Iran.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Mechatronics, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj 3149968111, Iran.
³ Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam.
⁴ Future Technology Research Center, College of Future, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology 123 University Road, Section 3, Douliou, Yunlin 64002, Taiwan.
⁵ Faculty of Civil Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany.
⁶ School of Economics and Business, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 1430 Ås, Norway.
⁷ Kando Kalman Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Obuda University, 1034 Budapest, Hungary.

Abstract

Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is a popular additive manufacturing (AM) method that has attracted the attention of various industries due to its simplicity, cheapness, ability to produce complex geometric shapes, and high production speed. One of the effective parameters in this process is the filament feed presented in the production G-code. The filament feed is calculated according to the layer height, the extrusion width, and the length of the printing path. All required motion paths and filling patterns created by commercial software are a set of straight lines or circular arcs placed next to each other at a fixed distance. In special curved paths, the distance of adjacent paths is not equal at different points, and due to the weakness of common commercial software, it is not possible to create curved paths for proper printing. The creation of a special computer code that can be used to make various functions of curved paths was investigated in this study. The filament feed parameter was also studied in detail. Next, by introducing a correction technique, the filament feed was changed on the curved path to uniformly distribute the polymer material. Variable-stiffness composite samples consisting of curved fibers can be produced with the proposed method. The high quality of the printed samples confirms the suggested code and technique.

Keywords: 3D printing; Composite material; additive manufacturing (AM); computational materials science; computational mechanics; curvilinear path; filament feed; fused deposition modeling (FDM); material design; variable-stiffness composites.