Development of Polymer Composites by Additive Manufacturing Process

Additive Manufacturing is technology capable of producing engineering components of complex geometries in a single step. The booming interest in Additive Manufacturing (AM) is seeing a rising number of industries and research entities adopting this technology into their manufacturing practices. Engineering applications may need materials with unusual combinations of properties, which cannot be provided only by metals, polymers or ceramics. For such applications, composite materials combining two or more materials allow having the preferred properties combined in a single material. Polymers Parts built by AM process generally possess lack of strength and poor functionality as fully functional and load bearing components. Lower thermal conductivity, poor stiffness, and poor wear resistance of polymer components and prototype parts further limits their application as functional parts for many engineering uses. 3D printing of polymer composites with addition of suitable reinforcement addresses some of these issues. Thus, AM, which can be defined as a process of adding materials to produce objects in successive layers in contrast to subtractive processes, is gaining significance for critical applications using composite materials. The article elaborately discusses the additive manufacturing processes with respect to polymers composites, summarizes the challenges, opportunities and discusses the implications of developing polymer composites by additive manufacturing with a few case studies. A detailed review of AM of polymers reinforced with fillers mainly focusing on the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process is presented.