Probabilistic analysis of homogenized elastic property for resin products fabricated by additive manufacturing based on three-dimensional random field modeling of microstructure

Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques have been used in several fields of science and industry, and fabrication techniques are being updated. For this fact, especially, for industrial use, mechanical property evaluation methodologies for AM products and standards for product quality assessment should also be well established. In this paper, a probabilistic evaluation of the homogenized elastic properties of a resin product fabricated by a material extrusion-based AM technique is attempted by considering the randomness of both material and microscopic geometrical quantities. This AM method fabricates a resin structure by piling up melted resin, and to decrease consumed material and influence of thermal deformation, the inner structure of the fabricated products will include many pores and its geometry is difficult to be well controlled. From this fact, the products will be regarded as a heterogeneous material with complex random microstructure. This will cause difficulty in the evaluation of its apparent material properties and therefore a probabilistic homogenization analysis is attempted for their quantitative estimation in this study. In particular, to investigate probabilistic properties of microscopic geometry, a random field modeling technique is employed for the evaluation of autocorrelation of the microscopic geometrical parameter, and the results of the autocorrelation identified by experimental observation are introduced to the probabilistic homogenization analysis. The two-dimensional or three-dimensional random field modeling is attempted, and the effectiveness of this approach is investigated by comparing it with the experimental result.