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Two types of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, fused filament fabrication (FFF) and selective laser sintering (SLS), were employed to fabricate specimens from three widely used AM polymers: polylactic acid (PLA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), and polyamide (PA): the first two using FFF and PA using SLS. The single‐edge notch bending (SENB) test was employed to measure the mode‐I fracture toughnesses of bulk and AM specimens in three directions relative to the printing direction. Unlike their bulk counterparts, AM polymers exhibited anisotropic fracture toughness. The degree of anisotropy in FFF‐PLA was much larger than FFF‐ABS and SLS‐PA. The smallest fracture toughness value for each AM polymer was achieved along the transverse printing direction. Different AM techniques affect fracture toughness differently. For instance, FFF is shown to increase PLA's plastic deformation, while SLS reduces PA's ductility. The decrease in fracture toughness is consistently observed when transitioning from bulk polymers to AM ones, reaching as much as 75%. This study provides insights into the fracture toughness of AM parts made via popular plastics, which are crucial for designing structural parts using FFF and SLS processes. Highlights: Additively manufactured polymers always exhibit some anisotropic fracture toughnessDifferent additive manufacturing techniques affect the fracture toughness differentlyFused filament fabrication increases polylactic acid's plastic deformationBut selective laser sintering reduces polyamide's ductility [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because additively manufactured materials are increasingly being used in load-bearing structures, strength research has become critical. Surprisingly, numerous studies have reported the tensile strength measurements, but only a few studies have presented meaningful results for the shear strength measurements of additively manufactured polymers. Hence, this paper proposes a combined experimental and numerical investigation of a new interlayer shear strength measurement approach, and it targeted the applications of the same polyamide (PA12) specimens made with fused deposition modeling (FDM) and selective laser sintering (SLS). A necking-shaped shear specimen was developed to measure the pure shear strengths with the aid of a three-dimensional (3D) finite element analysis. The results showed that the specimens made with FDM and SLS exhibited totally different shear failure behaviors. The ultimate shear strength of the FDM-PA specimens had more than a 32% increase over that of the SLS-PA specimens. An interface mechanics assumption was employed to explore the different shear failure mechanisms with the support of a fractography analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]