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Investigations on the melt flow behaviour of aluminium filled ABS polymer composite for the extrusion-based additive manufacturing process

In extrusion-based additive manufacturing (AM) process, the melt flow rate (MFR) of material plays a significant role in determining the suitable process parameters for printing parts. MFR of the polymers varies on the addition of fillers which eventually leads to alteration in the pre-set values of process parameters. The present study deals with the evaluation of MFR of aluminium (Al) filled acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) polymer matrix composite using melt flow index tester for extrusion-based AM process. L16 Taguchi OA method was used to design the experiments considering three factors and four levels. Extrusion temperature, extrusion load and filler loading (wt.% of Al) were considered as the input factors, while MFR was selected as the measured response. Furthermore, the significance of each factor was determined using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and signal-to-noise (SN) ratio techniques. Experimental results indicated the improvement in the MFR for 10 wt.% Al filled ABS composite. However, the opposite trend in MFR was observed for other combinations of ABS/Al. Based on obtained MFR results, process parameters were established to print parts of developed ABS/Al composite through a customised extrusion-based AM process. The present study may be useful in the fabrication of customised lightweight conductive structures.