Development and printability of diamond-containing composite filament for material extrusion
ISSN: 1355-2546
Article publication date: 5 May 2023
Issue publication date: 3 July 2023
Abstract
Purpose
Material extrusion technology is considered to be an effective way to realize the accurate and integrated manufacturing of high-performance metal diamond tools with complex structures. The present work aims to report the G4 binder that can be used to create metal composite filament loading high concentrations of large diamond particles through comparative experiments.
Design/methodology/approach
The quality of filaments was evaluated by surface topography observation and porosity measurement. And the printability of filaments was further studied by the tensile test, rheological test, shear analysis and printing test.
Findings
The results show that the G4 binder exhibits the best capacity for loading diamonds among G1–G4. The L4 filament created with G4 has no defects such as pores, cracks and patterns on the surface and section, and has the lowest porosity, which is about 1/3 of the L1. Therefore, the diamond-containing composite filament based on G4 binder exhibits the best quality. On the other hand, the results of the tensile test of L5–L8 filaments reveal that as the diamond content increases from 10% to 30%, the tensile strength of the filament decreases by 29.52%, and the retention force coefficient decreases by 15.74%. This can be attributed to the formation of inefficient bonding areas of the clustered diamond particles inside the composite filament, which also leads to a weakening of the shear strength. Despite this, the results of the printing test show that the diamond-containing composite filament based on the G4 binder has reliable printability.
Originality/value
Therefore, the G4 binder is considered to solve the most critical first challenge in the development of diamond-containing filament.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 41872186], the National Key Research and Development Program of China [No. 2021YFB3701800] and the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 2020JJ5141].
Declaration of competing interest: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this paper.
Citation
Su, Z., Kong, X., He, T., Wu, D., Wu, J. and Zhang, S. (2023), "Development and printability of diamond-containing composite filament for material extrusion", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 1486-1498. https://doi.org/10.1108/RPJ-11-2022-0377
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited