Development of Novel Test Specimens for Characterization of Multi-Material Parts Manufactured by Material Extrusion

Multi-material additive manufacturing (AM) offers new design opportunities for functional integration and opens new possibilities in innovative part design, for example, regarding the integration of damping or conductive structures. However, there are no standardized test methods, and thus test specimens that provide information about the bonding quality of two materials printed together. As a result, a consideration of these new design potentials in conceptual design is hardly possible. As material extrusion (ME) allows easily combination of multiple polymeric materials in one part, it is chosen as an AM technique for this contribution. Based on a literature review of commonly used standards for polymer testing, novel test specimens are developed for the characterization of the bonding quality of two ME standard materials printed together. The proposed specimen geometries are manufactured without a variation of process parameters. The load types investigated in the course of this study were selected as examples and are tensile, lap-shear, and compression-shear. The conducted tests show that the proposed test specimens enable a quantification of the bonding quality in the material transition. Moreover, by analyzing the fracture pattern of the interface zone, influencing factors that probably affect the interface strength are identified, which can be further used for its optimization.