Constitutive parameter identification of 3D printing material based on the virtual fields method

• Constitutive parameter identification method for 3D printing material is presented.
• Design method of 3D printing specimen with deformation carriers is offered.
• Influence of missing data near the specimen edge on VFM is analyzed.

In recent years, 3D printing technology has grown rapidly, and also has shown the great potential to be utilized in different fields. The identification of the constitutive parameters of materials fabricated by 3D printing is very important for product designing and technique selection. In this paper, a constitutive parameter identification method for 3D printing materials combining the integrated deformation carriers with the virtual fields method (VFM) is presented. The experimental process consists of three steps: fabricating the specimen with integrated deformation carriers by 3D printing; measuring the deformation fields by a full-field optical method; identifying the constitutive parameters by VFM. In the first step, the design method of the integrated deformation carriers is described in detail. Serving as a practice of the above process, a bending specimen with integrated deformation carriers was manufactured by the stereolithography technique, and the orthotropic constitutive parameters of this specimen at different temperatures were identified. The successful experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed method, and show its advantages on aspects of high efficiency and easy processing as well.