On digital twinning of fused filament fabrication for tensile properties of polyvinylidene fluoride composites-based functional prototypes

In the last two decades, several studies have been conducted for the process parametric optimization of fused filament fabrication (FFF) with a variety of thermoplastic composites, especially for mechanical properties. But hitherto less has been conveyed, on the development of dynamic reduced order models (ROMs) for digital twining (DT) of tensile properties (of 3D printed implants/scaffolds) with novel thermoplastic-based composites. In this study, for the generation of dynamic ROM (for hybrid analytics), the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio was used to ascertain the best settings of parameters for tensile properties of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) composite. The study suggests that the best setting of the FFF process, for the 3D printing of PVDF composite (90% PVDF, 8% hydroxyapatite (HAp), and 2% Chitosan (CS) (for maximizing the tensile properties as per ASTM-D638-Type-V) are nozzle temperature (NT) of 235°C, raster angle (RA) 45°, printing speed (PS) of 60 mm/s respectively resulting in peak load (PL) 394.87 N, peak stress (PSt) 33.92 MPa, Young’s modulus (E) 2.606 MPa. For a modulus of toughness (MOT) of 0.484 MPa, the best settings are NT 230°C, RA 90°, and PS 50 mm/s. The results are supported by the morphological analysis.