Fdm 3D Printed Wood-Fiber Reinforced Architected Composites

Abstract

As a renewable source of cellulose, wood chips are transformed in this study to reinforce bio-based thermoplastic filaments for fused deposition modelling (FDM). A new processing method is developed for adding wood-fibers to polylactic acid (PLA) polymers to produce wood-fiber reinforced PLA filaments in order to 3D print high-performance composites. Dogbone samples are 3D printed with the produced filaments to evaluate their elastic and fracture properties as well as internal microstructure, with various weight fractions of wood-fiber. The experimental results demonstrate increased stiffness and ultimate strength and reduced density for composites with optimum wood-fiber content, compared to the pure PLA specimens. Furthermore, following the growing interest in lightweight cellular solids, wood-fiber reinforced PLA filaments are used to 3D print cellular materials with optimized microarchitectures. It was demonstrated that using wood-fiber reinforced composites for FDM 3D printing of advanced materials is a promising approach to not only extend the material properties of biopolymers but also to offer a new class of lightweight and sustainable structural materials. The experimental results on as-built 3D printed cells, compared with the results of a detailed computational analysis on as-designed cells, elicit that the designed architected cellular solids made of wood-fiber PLA composites can exhibit a considerably higher stiffness and ultimate strength than the conventional PLA hexagonal honeycombs.