Name
Technical Session XII - MSEC-168549
Date & Time
Thursday, June 26, 2025, 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Description

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers to create complex or prototype parts quickly and in a cost-effective manner. While most AM research focuses on a single process with a single material, multi-material additive manufacturing is becoming more prevalent, offering the unique advantages of AM for multi-material parts. Dissimilar material printing (DMP), a subset of multi-material printing, aims to print materials with dissimilar mechanical and thermal properties together, materials like metals and ceramics or thermoplastics and elastomers. Using DMP with multiple AM processes like fused filament fabrication (FFF) and direct ink write (DIW), a variety of dissimilar material parts are possible, from integrated sensors to higher energy density rocket motors. The introduction of multiple materials, however, also introduces unique issues absent in single material AM. Even relatively small differences in thermal and mechanical properties of materials can lead to issues when printing, including delamination between materials. This problem is more pronounced for dissimilar materials. Despite significant adhesion issues between many desirable dissimilar materials, work to quantify and control the adhesion for DMP is lacking. This knowledge gap is most significant for multi-process DMP. This work focuses on a subset of DMP using fused filament fabrication (FFF) alongside vibration assisted direct ink write (DIW) to address this knowledge gap. This work seeks to: 1. Develop a framework for quantifying the adhesion between dissimilar materials which can be implemented to DMP 2. Implement this framework to quantify the effects of parameters like print orientation and material choice 3. Applying this framework to quantify the effects of conditions during the printing process, such as thermal gradients Measurement of adhesion between materials is commonly performed using a double cantilever bean (DCB). A standard DCB, however, is not suited to materials with significant differences in mechanical properties. To address this, a modified double cantilever beam (mDCB) test is employed. By modifying a traditional DCB to stiffness match legs with different bending stiffnesses, a DCB can measure adhesion between dissimilar materials. This test can then be manufactured using traditional, hybrid, or fully additive methods. Using this mDCB and a hybrid manufacturing approach, the adhesion of polylactic acid (PLA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), and PVDF/polycaprolactone (PCL) blends with a common elastomer, hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB), was quantified. The effect of print orientation was also quantified. Notably, the fracture toughness was not observed to change significantly between most materials and print orientations. Instead, fracture type changed, indicating a change in adhesion between thermoplastic materials and print orientation. Higher adhesion was seen in PLA and PVDF/PCL blends compared to the neat PVDF and ABS. Adhesion was higher for the bed side print orientation, however this was likely because of residual adhesive. While the hybrid approach allowed testing of factors like orientation and material, it does not quantify other factors during printing which may affect adhesion. As such, future work will utilize a similar mDCB in a fully additively manufactured system to test the effect of factors like the addition of particles in the elastomer and thermal gradients on adhesion between the materials

Location Name
Think Tank
Full Address
Hyatt Regency
220 N Main St
Greenville, SC 29601
United States
Session Type
Doctoral Symposium
Paper #
MSEC-168549
Author List
Mitchell Donoughue
Paper Title
[P] Measuring the Effect of Print Parameters and Material Choice on Adhesion in Dissimilar Material Printing
Session Chair
Ping Guo