Materials Research
Here at Triton 3D, many of our members have hobbyist 3D printers. Our ultimate goal with this project is to understand what printing parameters create the strongest part in the least amount of time. General print settings such as wall thickness, nozzle diameter, infill percentage and others will be considered. We wish to have some objective data to help design our 3D printed parts. In order to achieve our goal, we will be doing multiple phases of tests on testing machines in one of our university’s testing labs. Phase one is establishing a base line for standard deviation between printers and printed parts via a tensile test on a standard testing size. From those results, we will decide how much to vary each part’s geometry and quantity for each for further tests.
If you are interested in being a part of this project, email me at lpbbockman+03@gmail.com
Currently we are getting ready to print, inspect, and test the samples and hope to be doing data analysis in a couple weeks.
Time and cost permitting, Our plan it to test the following variables:
Infill (0% – 100% infill) : 10% intervals
Shell Thickness (1-3)
Temperature (200-220) : 10 degree intervals
Material being tested: PLA (Polylactic Acid)
Geometry: ASTM Standard D638-2a
Below are pictures of the trials we ran in order to find the correct geometry for a tensile test that includes internal geometry.
