Effect of process parameters on the vibration properties of PLA structure fabricated by additive manufacturing

Advances in Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) enable the design and manufacturing of multi-material and multi-functional structure that can potentially be used to develop light weight and high damping structures for vibration control. However, very few studies mention the vibration characteristics of FFF printed structures. This paper investigates the effect of four process parameters, raster angle, nozzle temperature, layer height and deposition speed, on the vibration properties of FFF printed Polylactic Acid (PLA) structure through modal analysis and design of experiment. The effects of all four parameters show a good agreement on the first fives modes of resonance. It was found that raster angle significantly affects both resonance frequency (16.6%) and loss factor (7.5%). Meanwhile, the impact of the other three parameters is relatively low (less than 4%), which is different from previous research results on static mechanical properties. All these results provide a guidance for further application of FFF in vibration field.