Additive manufacturing on textiles with low-cost extrusion devices: adhesion and deformation properties

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing devices or 3D printers allow the 
possibility of creating almost anything. One of the most 
promising fields of application are wearable devices, which 
can be directly printed on textiles. This paper aims to study 
adhesion forces and warping effects when depositing a polymer 
onto a textile with a low-cost extrusion 3D printer. To achieve 
this, two different polymers (PLA and Filaflex) and six of 
the most common textile materials were selected. L-shaped 
specimens were printed by combining the two polymers and the 
six textiles. Most of the common printing settings were fixed 
for both materials, while the layer quality was 0.1 mm and 
0.2 mm. Once printed, they were inspected with a Coordinate 
Measuring Machine and the deformation of each specimen 
was quantified by calculating their maximum and minimum 
displacements. Afterwards, each specimen was axially tested 
to evaluate the adhesion forces between the polymer and the 
textile. In terms of warping, flexible filament showed the lowest 
values independent of printing quality (0.56 mm and 0.3 mm) 
relative to the rigid filament (0.73 mm and 0.8 mm). In terms 
of adhesion, the combination of a porous textile and a flexible 
filament got the highest values, regardless of the layer height 
selected. The conclusion of this study is that polymer textile 
deposition can be a real manufacturing strategy that should 
be considered when thinking about the design of a wearable 
device to be worn on the body.