Abstract The strength of parts produced by fused filament fabrication depends strongly on how the raster angles are arranged. While many studies have looked at conventional orientations such as 0°, 90°, and ±45°, very little work has examined systematic groupings of angles or how such groupings influence strength. In this study, a multi-objective optimization framework is implemented that combines classical lamination theory, the Tsai–Hill failure criterion, the Heat Transfer Search algorithm, and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution ranking method to identify effective raster angle configurations for improving tensile/shear and flexural/torsion performance. Tensile and bending experiments are carried out to establish the applied load values for optimization and to validate the methodology. The optimization produced both standard and non-standard symmetric raster angle configurations that improved strength. This includes 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 S for axial-bending, 1 1 1 1 86 86 86 86 S and 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 S for tensile-bending in the y – x direction, 45 −45 −45 −45 −45 45 45 45 S for shear–torsion, and −15 14 −15 14 −15 14 −15 14 S for tensile-torsion. The raster angle grouping study also showed how different layer arrangements can create either smooth or abrupt stress transitions across the thickness, giving useful insight into inter-layer bonding. Taken together, these results demonstrate that the proposed framework can be used to systematically tune raster orientations to improve the strength of fused filament fabricated acrylonitrile butadiene styrene parts, and may be extended to other additively manufactured components.
Nahar et al. (Sat,) studied this question.