Additive manufacturing of glass-fiber reinforced composites using FDM 3D printer

FDM 3D printing method, among additive manufacturing methods, has grown substantially due to its simplicity and low cost. Nowadays, it has enormous applications in various fields of additive manufacturing. Because of its laminar nature and weak adhesion between layers in this process, final parts have lower strength compared to those in traditional methods such as injection molding. These limitations suppress application of this technology in making complex polymer parts that should bear multi-axial loads. In this study, in order to increase strength of produced parts by fused deposition modeling (FDM) process, continuous glass fibers have been added to printed samples in order to produce a composite material. Successful strategy and methods were implemented to embed continuous glass fiber into the FDM process to achieve the goal of substantially increasing the 3D printed objects. The results show that by adding only 4% volume fraction of continuous glass fiber to PLA during printing, tensile strength increases more than 50%.