Fatigue Life Prediction of a Topology-Optimised Polyamide-12 Part Manufactured with Multi-Jet Fusion Technology

Sammanfattning: Additive manufacturing methods has been prevailing for several decades and the recent technological advancements brings in the flexibility and consideration for large-scale production in the industries. The components manufactured with these methods have wide variety of applications and therefore, it is crucial to investigate the mechanical performance of the printed parts. There have been many researches done to investigate the mechanical behaviour of polymer material but the studies are limited when it comes to the fatigue performance of the polymer parts printed using multi-jet fusion technology. The aim of the master thesis is to investigate the fatigue behaviour of polyamide12 (PA12) material with the components manufactured using HP’s multi-jet fusion 3D printing machine. Fatigue life is influenced by several factors such as the loading condition, the topology of the specimen, material properties, print quality and the environmental conditions. It is therefore essential to consider all these factors when developing the experiments for fatigue life prediction. The master thesis work can be divided into three sections. The first section focuses on evaluating the mechanical properties of polyamide12. This includes the quasi-static test for determining the tensile properties of specimens with the geometrical influence, the difference in properties in relation to the print directions, the influence of humidity and porosity over the mechanical performance of the material and finally the effect of internal heat generation and the surrounding temperature. The results show that the temperature and the quality of the specimens are the two major factors affecting the mechanical and fatigue performance of PA12. That being said, the next section focuses on setting up the fatigue experiments based on the data obtained from the static tests. When carrying out the experiment, both the test frequency and the surrounding temperature were foundto have a greater impact over the fatigue results. High test frequency showed a dramatic increase in the temperature of the specimen which caused an early failure. Hence, the experiments were developed in such a way that the influence of the thermal fatigue can be ignored by controlling the temperature of the specimen through a compressed air cooling system. The final section presents the findings, the conclusions about the material behaviour and the development of a finite element model to predict the fatigue life of a topology optimised demonstrator part using the data gathered from the experiments.