Best Practices in Additive Manufacturing of Continuous Fiber Composite Parts

Continuous fiber composite parts produced by additive manufacturing methods have several applications as functional parts, tooling and prototypes because of their high specific strength and high specific stiffness, in addition to the ability to orient the fiber in a desired direction within the layers. The lead time between the inception of thought and the realization of the product is very short, and it is a disruptive technology in the digital manufacturing industry. This paper presents the best practices that we followed while producing composite functional parts and tooling, which include material characterization, model file generation, analysis and optimization of fiber orientation, optimization of printing parameters and printer calibration. In addition, metrology and NDT were carried out to ascertain the quality of parts, particularly in functional parts.