PhD student with a master's degree in industrial design and winner of a scholarship with a Transportation Design project. His passion for the automobile and modern technologies have led him to design innovative solutions that intertwine the two areas mentioned above, generating several activities also in the aeronautical and railway sectors with experimentation with new materials and hybrid methodologies for finishing surfaces produced through rapid prototyping. He is currently studying innovative technologies aimed at three-dimensional surveying and modeling.
The evolution of innovative techniques in Industry 4.0 has characterized and defined the development of new materials for 3D printing, which have completely new properties, specifically new "material patterns." One of these is definitely TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane), the protagonist of an application for the following research in innovative Additive Manufacturing. This polymer has many advantages, such as high resistance to impact, wear, abrasion and cuts; moreover, it has a rather advanced adhesion of layers that allows for excellent mechanical homogeneity at the level of manufactured parts, making them isotropic. The proposed case study showed the results related to solving the problems caused by overheating of video devices used for test recordings and testing of racing vehicles, designing an innovative solution that can always be used while avoiding any kind of electrified technology to avoid an increase in failures and weight of the devices. A high level of attention was dedicated to respecting thermal stresses to bring the component to a high level of resistance to the high temperatures that are created in summer inside the cockpits exposed from the windshields to the sun. Important was the use of domestic 3D printers of low cost and performance with technical materials now also available at rather cheap prices. The tools used for the following research presents low-budget choices to take design to new levels of challenge in order to make 3D printing a usable tool for everyone to properly reproduce elements that cannot be mass-produced. The tools are: smartphones with high-resolution cameras, fluid-dynamic mechanical components, domestic 3D printers, TPU material spools, and computers with photogrammetry and 3D modeling software.
Mahesh Naik is a Ph.D. Scholar in Mechanical Engineering at Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, Pune, Maharashtra. He has completed B.E in Mechanical Engineering from Sanjivani College of Engineering, Kopargaon, Maharashtra, India (2015) and M.Tech in Manufacturing Engineering from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat (2017). His Ph.D. research area is Additive Manufacturing of polymer composite for Aerospace applications. He has worked for one year as Assistant Professor at Sandip Institute of Management and Technology, Nashik. Additive manufacturing, optimization of process parameters, mechanical and material characterization of fiber-reinforced polymer composite, and metal additive manufacturing are his research area of interest. He has published more than 15 research papers in National & International Conferences and Journals. He has been granted the International Travel Grant by DST, Govt. of India.
Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D Printing, has been there for more than two decades and has recently gained importance for manufacturing functional products. AM has excellent developments in recent days with a huge number of applications in industry, automotive, aerospace, medical, architecture, food, fashion, etc. Composite materials are widely used in structures with weight as a critical factor especially in aerospace industry. In recent periods, AM has gained lot of importance in fabricating composite material. Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is one of the promising AM technology used for the fabrication of complex geometry product using continuous fiber reinforced composite material. There is lot of research on effect of fiber orientation on tensile strength of composite materials made using conventional manufacturing processes. It will be interesting and significant to study the effect of fiber orientation (0°, 0°/90°, +45°/-45°) and infill pattern (honeycomb, triangular & rectangular) on tensile strength of additively manufactured continuous fiber reinforced polymer composite. Now-a-days, continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite materials are becoming more important in industrial applications due to inherit advantages such as excellent mechanical performance, recycling and potential lightweight structures. In present study, carbon was used as continuous fiber reinforced material which has high tensile resistance. The FDM based 3D printer named Markforged Mark Two was used to fabricate the test specimen. This work aims to investigate and find out the best combination of fiber orientation and infill pattern that has better tensile strength for additively manufactured polymer composite Further, microstructural analysis was conducted to investigate the fracture mechanism, morphology, and printing quality of the test specimens.