Investigating the effects of printing temperatures and deposition on the compressive properties and density of 3D printed polyetheretherketone

Polyetheretherketone (PEEK) is a biocompatible high-performance thermoplastic that can be processed through material extrusion (ME) additive manufacturing (AM) for load-bearing implant applications. In this work, density measurements and compression testing were used to investigate the relation between printing temperatures and deposition patterns of PEEK 3D printed samples. Different deposition patterns were tested with different nozzle and zone heater temperatures to observe how the heat input from the printing process influenced the deposition stability with different nozzle paths. Compression test results showed that samples with concentric-based deposition patterns resulted in higher compressive yield strength and modulus than the rectilinear samples. These results were correlated with the samples’ void contents estimated from density measurements. Both the highest 0.2