Effect of printing speed on tensile and fracture behavior of ABS specimens produced by fused deposition modeling

• Effect of printing speed is studied on tensile and fracture properties of ABS specimens made by FDM. • Path of crack growth is also analyzed for specimens made by different printing speeds. • Within the studied printing speeds, the sample produced with 70 mm/s printing speed shows the best fracture resistance. • This can be attributed to stronger interlayer bonding in these additively manufactured specimens. The current paper deals with the influence of printing speed on the tensile and fracture strength of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) specimens made by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique. Four different printing speeds of 10, 30, 50, and 70 mm/s are used to fabricate dog-bone and Semi-Circular Bending (SCB) specimens for examining the mechanical and fracture performance of FDM-ABS parts, respectively. Due to the plastic deformation in the crack tip zone of SCB specimens prior to fracture initiation, the critical value of J-integral is chosen as the fracture characterizing parameter. Therefore, elastic–plastic finite element analyses are performed to calculate the critical values of J-integral ( J c ). According to the experimental results, the fabricated specimens with a printing speed of 70 mm/s shows the best performance with the maximum elongation and fracture resistance compared to the other printed specimens with different nozzle speeds. For exploring the failure mechanisms in the tensile specimens Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is utilized and various failure mechanisms have been presented and discussed. These observations are then linked to the tensile and fracture properties of the studied specimens.