Fabrication and Characterisation of Aligned Discontinuous Carbon Fibre Reinforced Thermoplastics as Feedstock Material for Fused Filament Fabrication.

In this work, aligned discontinuous fibre composite (ADFRC) tapes were developed and investigated as precursors for a novel 3D printing filament. ADFRCs have the potential to achieve mechanical performance comparable to continuous fibre reinforced composites, given sufficient fibre length and high level of alignment, and avoid many of the manufacturing difficulties associated with continuous fibres, e.g.