Advanced Infill Designs for 3D Printed Shape-Memory Components

Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) is one of the most often used polymers in 3D printing based on the fused deposition modeling (FDM) method. On the other hand, PLA is also a shape memory polymer (SMP) with a relatively low glass transition temperature of ~60 °C, depending on the exact material composition. This enables, on the one hand, so-called 4D printing, i.e., printing flat objects which are deformed afterwards by heating them above the glass transition temperature, shaping them and cooling them down in the desired shape. On the other hand, objects from PLA which have been erroneously deformed, e.g., bumpers during an accident, can recover their original shape to a certain amount, depending on the applied temperature, the number of deformation cycles, and especially on the number of broken connections inside the object. Here, we report on an extension of a previous study, investigating optimized infill designs which avoid breaking in 3-point bending tests and thus allow for multiple repeated destruction and recovery cycles with only a small loss in maximum force at a certain deflection.