Experimental investigation of tribological performance of 3D printed textured journal bearings for various polymers

In this study, the 3D-printed textured journal bearings (TJBs) are developed by fused deposition modelling (FDM) process with three different polymers such as ABS, PLA and nylon. For the study, the process parameters such as texture depth (TD), rotor speed (S) and load (L) are considered as input parameters. The experimental analysis of 3D-printed TJB is performed based on the response surface methodology (RSM). With the RSM technique, the influence of these input parameters on the tribological performance of 3D-printed TJBs. The tribological performance of 3D-printed TJBs are wear resistance (WR) and wear temperature (WT). Further, the GRA analysis is performed to evaluate the optimum value of these process parameters for ABS, PLA and nylon polymer. These results demonstrate that the wear resistance (WR) of TJBs is first increases with the texture depth and then starts decreasing. Among all the polymers, the ABS polymer is the most significant, and nylon is the least significant polymer for the 3D-printed TJBs. The maximum WR (i.e. 76.576 m/mm3) of 3D-printed TJBs is observed for the PLA polymer. Whereas, nylon provides the least WR (i.e. 9.572 m/mm3) of 3D-printed TJBs. At the optimal value of process parameters (TD = 1.5 mm, S = 500 r/min and L = 10N), the WR and WT of 3D-printed TJBs (for ABS polymer) are 62.126 m/mm3 and 323.75 K respectively.