Effect of Infill Density and Printing Patterns on Compressive Strength of ABS, PLA, PLA-CF Materials for FDM 3D Printing

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printing is one of the most popular 3D printing technology today and its products is always interested to improving their mechanical properties by printed engineering parameters. In this study, the influences of infill density and printing pattern on mechanical properties of FDM 3D printing structure have been studied on some common printing materials including Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), Polylactic Acid (PLA), carbon fibre reinforced PLA composites (PLA-CF). Each material is printed with different patterns such as hexagonal, square, triangular, zigzag structures at 15% infill. Particularly for the triangle printed structure of ABS, there are three infill densities at 15 %, 25 % and 40 %. The experimental process has evaluated the strength and deformation of the printing patterns. The results have shown that the influence of printing patterns on compressive strength are significant because of the relationship between printing patterns and sample weight. Besides, infill density also have a great influence on the compressive strength of 3D printed products.