THE EFFECT OF THE INFILL TYPE AND DENSITY ON HARDNESS OF 3D PRINTED PARTS
Pınar Demircioğlu İsmail Böğrekçi H. Saygın Sucuoğlu Oğulcan Turhanlar
AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the infill type and density on hardness of the manufactured components with rapid prototyping technique. Computer Aided Design (CAD) models of specimens were prepared using Autodesk Inventor Software. Then the models were exported as STL file format for rapid prototyping. Disc shape specimens were produced with the diameter of 20 mm and thickness of 5 mm using Prusa İ3 desktop type 3D printer with 90-300 microns layer height manufacturing capacity. The printer settings were adjusted with Simplified3D software. The infill types were selected as rectilinear (linear), grid (diamond) and honeycomb (hexagonal). Layer heights were used as 200 microns for all of the samples. For each infill types; the specimens were produced with the infill density values of 15, 25, 50, 75 and 100%. The heated bed temperature was selected as 0 60 C to increase the bonding and surface quality. The extruder temperature was set to 195 C. Then the hardness of the manufactured specimens were measured with EMCO-TEST DuraScan micro hardness machine that has ability to perform Vickers and Knoop methods range between 10 gf and 10 kgf. In order to find the effects of the infill type and density on hardness of 3D printed specimens, the obtained results from Vickers micro hardness measurements were compared. The hexagonal infill with the density of 100% showed the highest hardness and also the hardness patterns could be presented from high to low as Hexagonal > Linear > Diamond.