Seyed M Hashemi - Professor, Department of Aerospace Eng., Ryerson University, Toronto (ON), Canada;
Ali Foroozanfar - Graduate (MASc) Student, Dept. of Aerospace Eng., Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada;

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D Printing, has recently undergone extensive development due to its flexibility and is now gradually finding a growing market in numerous fields including aerospace engineering. The trend is to enhance the material properties to a level where manufactured products can be printed to improveconcepts such as just-in-time production. To develop further engineering applicability all material properties should be carefully determined along with the understanding of factors affecting them. Several studies for 3D printed material have been carried out. The present study focuses on the determination of the dynamic properties for thePLA. The PLA material is processed through the popular FDM method, with three different build orientations. A beam vibration experiment, with several cantilevered test specimens, is conducted to generate the fundamental frequency results, which are then compared with those obtained from FEM modal analysis. The variation of results is in conformance with the trend documented by earlier studies on similar materials.

additive manufacturing (AM), 3D printing, PLA, non-contact vibrometry, Impulse Excitation Test (IET), FEM