3d Printing with Natural Fiber Reinforced Filament

An initial study of 3d printing with compound filament using different plastic matrices and sugar cane bagasse as the filler was conducted. In order to do this, a reverse engineering process was made to several 3d printer extruders to determine how to change the extruder in order to be able to print with the filament. To obtain the filament, a plastic extruder was modified to obtain a compound filament of 1.75 mm using a 3x4 design of experiments with the factors percentage of fiber (10% 20% 30%) and type of matrix(PE,PP,ABS,PLA). The filaments obtained were tested to determine the mechanical properties and finally were used in a 3d printing to compare results. Introduction Additive manufacturing technologies have the advantage over traditional technologies to produce fast, flexible and competitive parts, prototypes, molds, dies, or custom end products directly from digital information[1]. Additionally, they have the advantage of reducing product development times, and most importantly fabricate designs and features unmatched by other methods of manufacturing[2].The downside of the pieces obtained by rapid prototyping technologies are that the products obtained do not have the same mechanical properties than those obtained by traditional manufacturing processes. Additionally, the filament used in the process is not locally produced or distributed in Colombia, making the prices of the process higher for massive use. The proposal is to study the fabrication of a natural fiber reinforced composite of thermoplastic matrix reinforced with natural fibers, a combination that has shown in other applications to have higher mechanical performance than when using only the thermoplastic material [3], and investigate their application in the field of rapid manufacturing, specifically for Fused Deposition Modeling, FDM. To this, a design of experiments for the material was made, the material was mechanically characterized, and a reverse engineering process of some additive manufacturing equipment was made. Materials and Methods