On Almond Skin Powder Reinforced PA6 Composite for 3D Printing Applications

摘要

This paper reports the effect of almond skin powder (ASP) reinforcement in polyamide (PA)6 on mechanical, rheological, thermal and morphological properties of feed stock filament for use on commercial open source fused deposition modeling (FDM) setup without any hardware/ software alteration. It has been observed that initially up to 7.5wt proportion of ASP in PA6 the melt flow index (MFI) of composite matrix increased, further increase in proportion of ASP in PA6 resulted into decrease of MFI. Taguchi approach-based design of experiment has been used to analyze the Young's modulus of composite matrix (for ensuring sufficient stiffness while operation on FDM) with different wt proportions of ASP in PA6, prepared with twin screw extrusion (TSE) under different conditions of barrel temperature, screw speed and applied load. Barrel temperature of TSE is most significant parameter (having contribution of 82.75) for Young's modulus. The results are also supported by optical photomicrographs, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS).