Fracture and load-carrying capacity of 3D-printed cracked components

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd Regrading to the numerous potentials of additive manufacturing in producing components, three-dimensional (3D)-printed parts are becoming more prevalent in various industries and research associations. In this paper, fracture of U-notched 3D-printed parts under mode I and mixed mode I/II are experimentally investigated. To this aim, specimens are 3D-printed by polycarbonate (PC) and Nylon filaments using fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing. In the fabrication, U-notched rectangular specimens are produced. A series of experimental practices are performed to determine load-carrying capacity of U-notched 3D-printed parts. In the current study, a combination of J-integral failure criterion and the equivalent material concept (EMC) was implemented to investigate failure of the specimens. Since the tested material has shown elastic–plastic behavior, EMC was utilized to avoid computationally inefficient non-linear failure analyses. By the obtained results, it is concluded that combination of EMC and J-integral criterion is able to predict the experimental results for the different 3D-printed materials. Parallel to the experimental investigations, numerical simulations are conducted and a very good agreement between simulation finding and reported experimental results is shown.