Development of Fe-reinforced PLA-based composite filament for 3D printing: Process parameters, mechanical and microstructural characterization

The most used raw materials in 3D printers, commonly known as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), are filaments. These filaments are obtained by going through heating, injection, cooling, winding and coiling stages in the filament extruder machine. FDM technology, which is used especially for prototype production purposes, is expected to be used more widely due to its increased mass production capacity, recyclability, environmental friendliness and waste reduction. In this study, before the production of composite filament, preliminary tests were carried out with polylactic acid (PLA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PET-G) polymer granules in a laboratory type filament extruder machine, and the process parameters were determined for each polymer filament. Since the optimum process parameters (temperature, injection rate, extrusion rate, and winding rate) were obtained in PLA, composite filament was produced by reinforcing 5% iron (Fe) powder into the PLA matrix in the same extruder machine. The produced filaments were subjected to tensile, hardness, FTIR, surface roughness and SEM-EDS analyses. Analysis has shown that Fe-reinforced PLA-based composite filament increases the hardness of pure PLA filament by 21.15%, tensile strength by 49.60% and increases the surface roughness by 4 times. As a result, it was determined that 5%Fe powder added to PLA improved the mechanical properties but negatively affected the surface roughness.