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The present research aims to investigate the impact of various 3D printing process settings on the tensile strength and hardness properties of PLA polymer. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) technique was employed to fabricate the testing specimens with different build orientation, raster direction angle, and layer height. The experiments were also aided with optical microscopic images to identify the 3D print surface structure and quality. The fracture patterns were also specified. To bridge the knowledge gap surrounding 3D-printed material behavior, a correlation between the hardness and tensile strength was assessed based on the performance attained from the examined print parameters. Limited attention was given to this relationship in literature. This indicates the need for evaluating this correlation to understand the 3D fabricated material behavior entirely. The obtained results show that the highest Young’s modulus and ultimate tensile strength values were observed in the On-edge orientation samples (1.896 ± 0.044 GPa and 49.12 ± 0.78 MPa, respectively). Meanwhile, the best elongation at break was found in the 0.1 mm layer thickness specimen (3.13%). Further, it was noticed that the hardness and tensile strength are in a proportional relation when the print orientation parameter is the variable.
Hanon et al. (Fri,) studied this question.