Experimental and analytical investigation of the tensile behavior of 3D-printed composites based on micro-CT analysis

Mechanical properties of short fiber reinforced composites manufactured with fused deposition modeling is affected by variables such as printing properties and internal structure of the composite. In this study, the relation between the tensile properties of 3D-printed short fiber reinforced composites, printing orientation and internal structure is inspected. Samples of different printing orientations are manufactured. These samples are inspected under X-ray micro computed tomography (micro-CT) and their fiber orientation distributions and fiber properties are determined. Then, these internal structure properties are applied to analytical material models to estimate the tensile properties of composites. Estimated material properties are compared with tensile test results. It turns out that analytical models that consider internal structure properties provide more accurate estimations than other analytical models that does not take these into account.