Mechanical Properties and Economic Analysis of Fused Filament Fabrication Continuous Carbon Fiber Reinforced Composites

Additive manufacturing of composites offers advantages over metals since composites are lightweight, fatigue and corrosion-resistant, and show high strength and stiffness. This work investigates the tensile and flexural performance of continuous carbon-fiber reinforced (CCF) composites with different guide angles and number of layers. The cost and printing time analyses were also conducted. Tensile specimens with a contour-only specimen and one CCF layer with a 0° guide angle exhibited nearly comparable strength values. Increasing the number of CCF layers enhances the tensile properties. For the identical cost and reinforcement amount, 0°/0° provides a higher tensile strength and elastic modulus compared with 15°/−15°. The same phenomenon was observed for 15°/0°/−15° and 0°/0°/0°. The samples with one and two reinforcement layers had similar stiffness and maximum load values for flexural tests. For the samples with four layers, there was a considerable improvement in stiffness but a minor decrease in the maximum load.