Effects of Different Pore Architecture Designs on Compressive Mechanical Behaviour of 3D-Printed PLA-Based Carbon Nanofibre Structures

Additive manufacturing, or AM, or 3D printing is the technology that is commonly used to create genuine three-dimensional objects that made of ceramic, metal, polymer, or combination of these materials. Currently, AM routes are attracting different fields of applications because of its lightweight and significant mechanical strength. The friendly user interface of fused deposition modelling (FDM) increased much attention amongst the different AM techniques. In the recent trends, it has transformed the rapid manufacturing of polymer-based customized composite parts. Therefore, in the present work, PLA (polylactic acid)-based carbon nanofibre composites structures were manufactured using FDM-based 3D printing technique. Further, experimentations were performed by designing two different pore architectures such as rhombus and octagon and subsequently evaluate its performance by varying the strut thickness under uniaxial compression testing. The strut thickness was varied between the ranges of \(1\; {\text{and}}\; 1.5\;{\text{mm}}.\) The results shown that octagon structures were exhibited better mechanical strength as compared to rhombus structure. Moreover, the different mechanical properties such as Young’s modulus, maximum compressive strength, and compressive yield strength were increased with an increase in strut thickness of pore design in the range of (237.5 to 477 MPa), (7.55 to 23 MPa), and (6.5 to 13.5 MPa), respectively.