Experimental Study on the Tribological Characteristics of a 3D Printed Textured Surface

Abstract

In this paper, the 3D-printed samples are developed with polylactic acid (PLA) by considering the various bionic texture shapes on them. Here, the four different bionic texture shapes are considered, such as square, diamond, hexagonal and circle. The major objective of this experimental study is to evaluate the influence of these bionic texture shapes on the tribological characteristics (wear rate and friction coefficient) of 3D-printed specimens. From these experimental results, it is found that the diamond texture shape is found to be most significant for the better tribological characteristics of the printed sample. Further, the operating parameters, such as aspect ratio, texture depth, speed and load, are also analysed by using the response surface methodology. From these results, the load is the most significant operating parameter for better tribological characteristics of the printed sample, followed by texture depth. The optimised value of operating parameters is also evaluated by using the grey relational analysis (GRA) technique. However, the friction coefficient firstly decreases and then increases with the texture depth.