Experimental and Numerical Investigation of 3D Printing PLA Origami Tubes under Quasi-Static Uniaxial Compression

Abstract

The investigation aims to study the effects of temperature and damage constitutive model on the energy absorption performance of polymeric origami tubes under quasi-static impact. The uniaxial tensile responses of 3D-printed polylactic acid (PLA) samples following standard ASTM-D412 have been studied to characterize the mechanical properties at three temperatures: 30 °C, 40 °C, and 50 °C. The damage constitutive model is used to accurately characterize the stress-strain relations of the PLA. Quasi-static compressive experiments are performed on polymetric tubes with different temperatures. The 3D-printed technique is used to ensure the integrated formation of these polymeric origami tubes. The user-defined material subroutine VUMAT for ABAQUS/Explicit has been developed for the damage model. Compared with the results, the observed deformation processes are well captured by the numerical simulations, and the influence of temperature on the axial compression is also analyzed in detail.