Characterization of the Tensile Strength of FDM-Printed Parts Made from Polylactic Acid Filament using 33 Full-Factorial Design of Experiment

This study is about the characterization of the tensile strength of PLA filaments at varied parameters namely, extrusion temperature, layer height and shell thickness. The PLA filaments are printed using a 3D printer under the principle of fused deposition modeling. The printed model abides by the ASTM D638 standard, which is the standard for tensile testing plastics. The three chosen factors have three levels each and three replications. A full factorial design of experimentation was utilized for the analysis of the data, and ANOVA was used to determine the statistically significant effect among the population means, and if interaction exists among the factors. Briefly, all the null hypotheses were rejected, and all alternative hypotheses were accepted, which states that not all means among the factors are equal and that there exists an interaction among the chosen factors. To get the best result on tensile strength, extrusion temperature should be leveled to 220°C, layer height should be maintained at a value of 0.3 mm, and a higher shell thickness should be observed, like for example, 1.2mm.