Development of crab shell particle reinforced polylactic acid filaments for 3D printing application

In the polymeric 3D printing process, composite material development is based on preparing feedstock material such as polymeric filaments. The present work focuses on recycling crab shell particles as bio fillers for devel-oping Polylactic Acid feedstock material. The extruded filament's intrinsic properties, such as tensile strength, diameter deviation, and surface roughness, were measured to its crab shell composition of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 wt %. The results depict that the maximum tensile strength of 61.3 MPa was achieved on the 8% crab shell-reinforced PLA polymeric filaments. A minimum diameter deviation of 0.001 was observed on the 2% crab shell -reinforced PLA filaments. The surface morphology of the extruded PLA/crab shell filaments of 8% possesses uniform distribution of added particles in the polymeric matrix. From the overall results, the PLA/crab shell filament of 8% composition is an optimal composition feedstock material for the 3D printing application to develop biomaterials like bio-scaffolds.