Static assessment of notched additively manufactured acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)

The present paper tackles the problem of performing the static assessment of notched additively manufactured (AM) acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) components. A large number of ABS specimens containing different notch profiles and sharpness were manufactured (flat on build plate) by varying the printing angles to simulate the stress concentration phenomena. These specimens were tested under tension and three-point bending to generate a large amount of experimental data. From the experimental results, it is evident that the AM ABS materials can simply be modelled as an elastic, brittle, homogenous and isotropic material. This simplification allowed the application of the Theory of Critical Distances (TCD) to become a viable static assessment tool for the AM ABS components. As a result, it was proven that the TCD is an accurate and valid static assessment tool for the AM ABS components with estimations mainly falling within an error interval of about ±20%. This result is certainly rewarding from an engineering application perspective as the TCD successfully enables engineers to assess the static strength of additively manufactured engineering components that contain intricate geometrical features accurately, rapidly, and economically.