Date of Award

2026-05-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Advisor(s)

Francisco Medina

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) with polymer materials has widespread adoption across industries due to its numerous benefits: rapid prototyping, material variety, cost efficiency, manufacturing complexity, on-demand production, and sustainability. AM enables fast prototyping, diverse material choices, and cost savings by eliminating tooling and reducing waste. It excels at producing intricate, lightweight designs. On-demand production reduces inventory and lead times. Polymer AM contributes to sustainability by minimizing material waste. These advantages make polymer AM popular in aerospace, automotive, healthcare, and consumer products industries. Despite these advantages, interlayer adhesion has been a reoccurring issue with AM of polymer materials. With polymer printing, there has been a decline in mechanical properties because of poor interlayer adhesion. Due to this issue, there has been a rise in research related to the improvement of interlayer bonding with Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), giving rise to the idea of bead-weaved layered prints. The goal of this work is to leverage anisotropic mechanical properties, which currently limit the application of AM parts, such that deposited material is preferentially orientated to expected strain fields by using multi-axis 3D printing. To achieve these goals, the following hypothesis statements will be tested. Hypothesis Statement 1: The weaving of beads, as opposed to planar layers whose interaction with upper/lower material is solely dependent on interlayer bonding, will fundamentally change the shear and tensile stresses experienced by AM parts. Hypothesis Statement 2: Alternating deposition pattern will reduce stress concentrations at layer interfaces yielding isometric mechanical properties - a desirable characteristic not currently associated with material extrusion AM.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

90 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Arianna Isabel Villegas

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Engineering Commons

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