Nonlinear Material Modeling for Mechanical Characterization of 3-D Printed PLA Polymer With Different Infill Densities

Abstract In additive manufacturing, also called 3-D printing, one of widely used materials is polylactide thermoplastic polymer (PLA) by means of the fused deposition modeling. For weight reduction purposes, infill density is an often used feature in slicing for 3-D printing. We aim at investigating the effect of infill density on the mechanical properties of structures. Therefore, we demonstrate how to prepare tensile specimens and test them by a universal testing machine. Results are collected by a so-called digital image correlation method. As infill density increases, from 10% to 100%, the nominal strain at break decreases from about 2.1% to 1.2%, respectively. In other words, the material becomes more ductile by decreasing the infill density of PLA material, which is possible to justify with an effect of the microstructure created by the infill density. Furthermore, we discuss a possible material model fitting all the presented results and report that a hyperelastic material model is needed for the PLA. We utilize Neo-Hookean, Mooney–Rivlin, and Yeoh models, all for different infill densities. All three models show a fairly good agreement to the experimental data. Neo-Hookean model has an advantage of only one parameter, which increases monotonously with infill density.