Mechanical and viscoelastic properties of polylactic acid (PLA) materials processed through fused deposition modelling (FDM)

Polylactic acid (PLA), made from renewable sources, is a compostable and biodegradable thermoplastic polymer. PLA material is used for producing consumer products in different applications such as building, agriculture, transportations, electrical appliances and houseware. Therefore, the study of PLA properties becomes an important issue now-a-days. Current industrial processing techniques are time consuming and expensive. To overcome such difficulties fused deposition method (FDM) has extensively been used to quickly produce such industrial purpose physical objects. Therefore, the thesis was focused to investigate and analyse the effects of different FDM build parameters on PLA properties and find out the best build parameter.