Thermography based approach for the rapid assessment of damage in PA12 obtained by Multijet-Fusion printing technology

Additive manufacturing (AM) allows the creation of structural components adopting several printing strategies. Between them, MultiJet-Fusion (MJF) is one of the most recent AM technologies on the market, offering fast, economical and large production, at the same time, of functional parts which can undergo to several loading conditions, include fatigue. As the final functional parts may have even complex geometries, it is of fundamental importance to rapidly assess the fatigue limit and the SN curve of the material, to allow a proper fatigue design of the components. Under fatigue load conditions, the Polyammide-12 (PA12) has proven to dissipate the mechanical energy into heat and increase its temperature. According to the Thermographic Methods, the temperature can be adopted as a damage index for the material. In the present work, PA12 obtained by MJF technology were tested and monitored with an infrared camera to assess the initiation of damage within the material due to its peculiar internal microstructure, and to accelerate the testing time, in order to provide reliable data for the mechanical design of components.