A comparative study between in-house 3D printed and injection molded ABS and PLA polymers for low-frequency applications

A cost of injection molded part is several times higher than the 3D printed part and it depends on several parameters (Energy, mold size, number of parts, etc). In particular, it is difficult to make a component using this technique which is having a complex 3D geometry, as a consequence, it further demands higher initial mold cost. Therefore, finding an alternative technique is inherent to manufacture thermoplastic polymer components for applications related to fans, electric motors, radio-controlled aircraft and toy helicopters. These structures are subjected to frequencies less than 20 Hz. Hence, employing frequency characterization studies are essential as these are not studied extensively. The present work aims at establishing a desktop based an in-house fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer using advanced commercially available ‘Cura’ software and characterizing the mechanical and thermal behavior of two different thermoplastic polymers such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA). Specimens are printed with four different layer heights (0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 mm) and two different infill patterns, namely rectilinear and triangular. The mechanical properties of these 3D printed samples are compared with the properties obtained from the other 3D-printers and injection molding machine from the literature, and obtained a reasonably good agreement. The thermal characterization is performed to study the viscoelastic properties and glass transition temperature (T g ) using the dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), respectively. Crystallographic parameters for each peak of ABS and PLA matrices are analyzed using the X’Pert high score software, by importing the 2 θ values obtained from X-ray diffraction (XRD) instrument, as input in it.