Yes, lots of people have done it, but you
NEED to test the parts made on the specific hardware and firmware, with the specific filament stock, and with the specific slicing arrangement intended (layer thickness, fill pattern and density, etc), as the results are
HUGELY variable!
E.g. take a look at
In a recent study, Pearce and his team examined the basic and tensile strength and elastic modulus of printed materials in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA) using a range of open source hardware. They found average tensile strengths of 28.5 MPa (megapascals) for ABS and 56.6 MPa for PLA, with average elastic moduli of 1807 MPa for ABS and 3368 MPa for PLA.
The study concludes, "It is clear from these results that parts printed from tuned, low-cost, open-source RepRap 3-D printers can be considered as mechanically functional in tensile applications as those from commercial vendors."
[My emphasis]
Copy of full paper here:
- the scatter of the data in Figures 2 and 3 is VERY illuminating!
Typical values for "virgin" ABS stock are a tensile strength of ~ 44 MPa and an elastic modulus of around 2.3 GPa (eg Ref:
), and for PLA the corresponding values are around 50 MPa and 3.5 GPa respectively (eg Ref:
)
(Unfortunately, the referenced paper by Pearce et al does not seem to give the mechanical properties for their stock filament.)
This suggests that with a
well-calibrated machine under ideal (laboratory) conditions, you can get something like 75% of the "virgin" stock tensile strength, and up to 90% of the elastic modulus (stiffness), but actual results can be very variable (as the paper demonstrates), and can be
MUCH lower in "real-world" conditions.
Note that most hobby 3D printers have a certain proportion of "failed" prints, which are obviously defective and are discarded, but an indeterminate number of "possibly defective" prints, where the part looks OK, but may actually be marginal on inter-layer adhesion etc. In a test situation, these parts might actually achieve very little test strength / stiffness, but might be perfectly acceptable for non-critical components, depending on the design and how they are loaded in service. (Part of the "art" of design for 3D printing is understanding the mechanical properties of the printed parts, and setting them up to minimise the risk of failure - e.g. don't apply tension across layers, avoid "bridges" and the like which can create regions of lower strength material, etc.)
