Experimental Characterization Framework for SLA Additive Manufacturing Materials

This article belongs to the Special Issue Mechanical Performance of Polymeric Parts Obtained by Additive Manufacturing. Additive manufacturing (AM) is driving a change in the industry not only regarding prototyping but due to the ease of including printed parts in final designs. Engineers and designers can go deeper into optimization and improvements of their designs without drawbacks of long manufacturing times. However, some drawbacks such as the limited available materials or uncertainty about mechanical properties and anisotropic behavior of 3D printed parts prevent use in large-scale production. To gain knowledge and confidence about printed materials it is necessary to know how they behave under different stress states and strain-rate regimes, and how some of the printing parameters may affect them. The present work proposes an experimental methodology framework to study and characterize materials printed by stereolithography (SLA) to clarify certain aspects that must be taken into account to broaden the use of this kind of material. To this end, tensile and compression tests at different strain rates were carried out. To study the influence of certain printing parameters on the printed material behavior, samples with different printing angles (θ = [0–90]) and different printing resolution (layer height of 50 and 100 µm) were tested. In addition, the effects of curing time and temperature were also studied. The testing specimens were manufactured in the non-professional SLA machine Form 2 from Formlabs® using resin called Durable. Nevertheless, the proposed experimental methodology could be extended to any other resin. Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, Gobierno de España grant number DPI2017-85073-R, and Vicerrectorado de Política Científica UC3M (Projects 2013/00413/003 and 2014/00006/003).