Experimental Investigation of Flexural Properties of Fibre Glass Reinforced Polymer

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing technology in which computer aided design is converted into STL file and then fed to 3D printer after slicing the design with the help of slicer software. Masked Stereo-lithographic apparatus (MSLA) is a type of liquid based 3d printer in which an array of LED is used to cure the photosensitive polymer resin with the help of ultra violet radiations. These radiations solidify the resin on platform of printer when fall on exposed area. The platform rises for next layer and this process continues until all the layers are cured and part is manufactured. The time to manufacture the part depends on layer thickness, height of part and the orientation of the part on platform. These parameters are set during the slicing process. We can find many applications of SLA printers in fields like engineering, medical, dentistry, jewelry and many others. These printers now a day are used to manufacture the final parts apart from the prototypes but there is limitation in the availability of resin of required mechanical strength. So to overcome this problem researches are carried out to manufacture polymer composites in different ways. This research focuses on using short glass fibres of different strand lengths as reinforcing material to matrix photosensitive polymer. The glass fibres of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 mm lengths are used as reinforcing materials and nine specimens including neat one are manufactured in MSLA printer. The flexural properties of these specimens are obtained by performing 3-point bend test on universal testing machine as per ISO 14125 standard. The graphs of the force vs deflection are obtained and flexural strengths and flexural modulus is calculated and compared for all the specimens. It was observed that the flexural strength as well as flexural modulus of these specimens was increased initially for 5 and 10mm strands lengths and then started decreasing as the strands length increases. The maximum value of flexural strength and flexural modulus was obtained for 10mm glass fibre length and minimum for 40mm.