University Study of 3D Printed Materials is Good for Industry

In August, Stratasys announced that England's Loughborough University had completed independent studies on plastic parts created by the FDM additive manufacturing process, using ABS plastic and polycarbonate.

This may be exciting news for us, but it has greater implications for the design and manufacturing community. We believe this study is the first of its kind, and it offers data often necessary for manufacturing applications and sometimes for functional prototyping.

If additive manufacturing is to become a generally accepted alternative to traditional manufacturing processes, we should welcome and encourage more studies like these. They offer solid data engineers can rely on when deciding to use an additive process for production runs.

The Loughborough performance studies evaluated polycarbonate and ABS plastic parts produced via Fused Deposition Modeling. They examine the effects of time, temperature and the environment on the parts' mechanical properties.

The evaluation was conducted over a 52-week period, and it measured the five following mechanical properties at temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 100 °C:

Tensile strength
Young’s modulus
Flexural strength
Flexural modulus
Elongation at break

The tests evaluated the samples in three environmental conditions: wet (immersed in water), dry (15% relative humidity) and controlled (50% relative humidity).

If you design products or specify manufacturing materials, I think you'll find the study results very interesting. I invite you to take a look.

Download the ABS-M30 study summary.
Download the PC study summary.