Establish Complete Database of Material Properties for FDM Printing of ULTEM™ 9085

PROBLEM

ULTEM™ 9085 is a polyetherimide high performance thermoplastic material with application acceptable strength-to-weight ratio and flame, smoke, and toxicity (FST) ratings.

This material is often used in aerospace, automotive, and other industrial applications where a high strength thermoplastic material is needed. As this material is one of the only high performance thermoplastic materials available for FDM, it is important to establish a complete database of material properties to further enable use in various commercial and government applications.

Such a database is a minimum requirement for deployment of an additively manufactured solution in a production environment and currently does not exist.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this program was to build upon previous results from America Makes Project Call #1 project entitled “Maturation of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) Component Manufacturing” by expanding and creating a supplementary, standalone dataset that addresses the concerns and flaws from the first round of study.

The project aimed to offer this dataset to America Makes’ members and government partners to enable broad dissemination of the collective knowledge for future part design. A further objective was to enable industry members to use their own design allowable methodologies for statistical data analysis, thereby creating a well utilized and broadly applicable dataset which would create a framework for future materials/processes.