High-Throughput Additive Manufacturing of Continuous Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Plastic by Multifilament

Additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) of continuous carbon fiber-reinforced plastics with fused deposition modeling is a burgeoning manufacturing method because of its potential as a powerful approach to produce lightweight, high strength and complex parts without the need for a mold. Nevertheless, it cannot manufacture parts rapidly due to low throughput. This paper proposes a high-throughput additive manufacturing of continuous carbon fiber-reinforced plastics by multifilament with reference to fiber tape placement. Three filaments were fed and compaction printed simultaneously by a robotic manufacturing system. The coupled thermal-mechanical model of the filament deformation during printing was developed to eliminate the initial interval between the filaments and improved mechanical properties. Furthermore, the mathematical relationship between filament deformation and printing parameters consisting of printing temperature, printing speed and roller pressure was proposed using response surface methodology with the line width as the response. The tensile tests demonstrate that the tensile properties of printed parts are positively correlated with the line width, but not infinitely improved. The maximum tensile strength and tensile modulus are 503.4 MPa and 83.11 Gpa, respectively, which are better than those obtained by traditional methods. Void fraction and scanning electron microscope images also reveal that the appropriate line width achieved by the reasonable printing parameters contributes to the high-throughput multifilament additive manufacturing of continuous carbon fiber-reinforced plastics. The comparison results indicate that the high-throughput multifilament additive manufacturing proposed in this paper can effectively improve the speed of continuous carbon fiber-reinforced plastics additive manufacturing without degrading the mechanical performance.