1. Introduction
Smart materials are prominent class of materials that have revolutionized both research and engineering. In general, materials with shape memory, usually named shape memory materials (SMM), are characterized by the shape memory effect (SME). SMMs are divided into several groups: Shape Memory Polymers (SMP), Shape Memory Alloys (SMA), Shape Memory Hydrogels (SMH) and Shape Memory Ceramics (SMC).SMPs can respond to a various external stimulus, and recover their deformed shape and return to their permanent shape from a programmed (temporary) shape under the influence of light [
1,
2], heat [
3], magnetic [
4], electricity [
5], moisture [
6], water [
7,
8]. SMAs for long have been the most prevalent, especially in human medicine [
9], aerospace [
10] and robotics [
11]. Yet today, SMP and SMH are slowly taking the lead among other SMMs due to their broad applicability and relatively low cost of the raw material and manufacturing. The advantages of SMP and SMH over, primarily SMA, are that the stiffness can be adjusted in a wide glass transition temperature range T
g (55-100 °C) [
12]. Besides that, SMPs are characterized by low density (≈1.2 g/cm
3), large deformations, biodegradability, biocompatibility, as well as low thermal conductivity [
13,
14]. SMPs can also restore shape after exposing to very large plastic deformations ≈500 %, while at SMA it is ≈6-7 %. In addition to mechanical, technological factors such as cost, fabrication, toxicity or recycling potential significantly affect the predominance of SMPs over SMAs [
15] in the era of green technologies and green polymers [
16].
The emergence of 4D printing represents an innovative fusion of smart materials and additive manufacturing techniques, propelling scientific exploration into material responsiveness to external stimuli and the development of intelligent structures for various applications. Smart materials in 4D printing adapt their properties or shapes in response to external stimuli. These materials can also harness energy, typically thermal, to perform mechanical tasks [
17]. 4D printing technologies have facilitated scientific exploration into material research, stimulus responsiveness, mathematical modeling, and the subsequent development of intelligent structures. 4D printing has garnered increased interest lately, notably through the pioneering work of Professor Tibbits' research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [
18]. Like most rapidly growing technologies, 4D printing relies on the rapid development of smart materials, 3D printers, mathematical modeling and design [
19]. The
Figure 1 shows that in contrast to 3D printing, the output product of 4D printing is an active or dynamic structure, which can be activated with appropriate external stimulus or energy input. The development of the new 4D printing industry is directly dependent on Material Science and the development of new materials. Besides materials growing and advancing in technologies such as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) [
20] or Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), Digital Light Processing (DLP) [
21], Stereolithography (SLA) [
22], Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Inkjet [
23,
24] it is also a condition for further progress in this field. Various materials such as PVC [
25,
26], PETG [
27], photopolymers [
28] are used in 4D printing even a blends [
29] and multimaterials for 3D printed auxetic structures [
30] are used in 4D printing. This variety of materials, printing technologies and even creating composites opens completely new perspectives and possibilities for the use of 4D printing in various fields.
PLA is a material that has many applications, both in medicine and non-medical fields. One of its key features is its biocompatibility, which makes it safe to use in medical treatments. As it is a product of the human body and obtained from natural sources, it is also biodegradable. This is especially important for medical applications, where the device needs to be absorbed by the body after it has served its function.
There is a growing trend, of replacing devices made of metal or alloys with polymers to allow gradual healing of the diseased tissue through the mechanical weakening of the polymer devices. Additionally, as biodegradation occurs over time, there is no need for additional procedures to remove the device [
31]. Due to the ability to customize the chemical structure and mechanical characteristics to the biochemical environment, PLA is widely used in biomedicine. It is used in various applications, including stents [
32], orthopedic screws [
33], supports for growing various cells, muscle tissue, bone and cartilage regeneration, planting osteogenic stem cells and implantation into bone defects [
34] and drug delivery and delivery devices [
35]. The use of PLA in additive manufacturing enables the production of complex biomedical devices based on computer-aided design and construction (CAD), in particular, with the use of patient-specific anatomical data, the creation of one-of-a-kind implants [
36] and prosthesis socket [
37]. A new challenge in the field of additive technologies is the application of 3D printing in the production of PLA composites, with or without reinforcement [
38], scaffolds [
39], biodegradable stents [
40] and lately in auxtic energy absorption structures [
41,
42,
43,
44,
45,
46,
47]. PLA can also be blended with other materials such as TPU in order to show that by changing the composition and programming temperature, the desired properties for different applications can be achieved so that the highest fixity, recovery, and stress recovery were obtained in hot, cold, and warm-programmed samples by manipulating the input energy and temperature [
48]. Beside other thermoplastics used in FFF, PLA also shows potential for blending with natural materials such as wood [
49].
In the last decade, the number of papers with mechanical tests of FFF samples has increased. In their paper [
50], the authors compare the mechanical characteristics of the unidirectional, 3D-printed material with that of homogeneous injection-molded PLA, showing that manufacturing by 3D-printing and annealing improves toughness of samples. One of the latest research deals with the influence of strain rate and temperature on the mechanical behavior of PLA printed structure in tension [
51]. Study aimed to analyze the effect of the infill line distance of 3D printed circular samples on their compressive elastic behavior during cyclic compressive loading [
52]. In the paper presented in [
53], 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. Also, this study includes, quasi-static compressive experiments are performed on polymetric tubes with different temperatures. In this study [
54] authors did experimental testing to determine compression performance and deformation behavior of 3D printed PLA lattice structures. In order to determine the influence of anisotropy and infill on the SME effect in printed materials, the authors in [
55] examined the samples using uniaxial tensile tests and compressive tests are performed to study the effect of infill patterns on mechanical properties. Paper [
56] presents experimental study of the compression uniaxial properties of PLA material manufactured with FFF in accordance with the requirements and conditions established in the ISO 604 standard characterizes the compression stiffness, the compression yield stress, the field of displacements, and stress along its elastic area until reaching the compression yield stress and the ultimate yield stress data showing that PLA material is promising for the manufacture of low volume industrial components that are subject to compression. Authors in [
57] introduce a novel honeycomb structure that can enhance the compression property and energy absorption 4D printing with PLA materials showing that the novel honeycomb had a high compression property and had high energy absorption capacity. In this work [
58], the influence of several factors such as printing temperature, bed temperature, printing speed, fan speed, and flow was studied showing that hat the parameters of extrusion-based 3D-printing influence the transformability of PLA-based materials. In this study [
59], PLA is used in the 4D printing process for the manufacturing of complex geometry absorber components produced FFF varying printing parameters (temperature at the nozzle, the deposition speed, the layer thickness) and activation temperature. Experiments shown that components have good shape memory properties mostly influenced by activation temperature. Experimental tensile and compression tests are conducted in [
60] on FFF PLA parts to evaluate the difference of main mechanical properties in tensile and compressive state. In this paper [
61] monotonic, fatigue and creep behaviour of PLA under compression is studied, using cylindrical specimens tested according to ASTM D695 was conducted to identify and quantify the effects of printing parameters on the compression behavior of these specimens and failure mechanisms finding that compressive strength is linearly dependent with the density of the samples. In their paper [
62] they examine PLA and PLA-Cu samples under both static and dynamic loading were studied using a universal testing machine and a split Hopkinson pressure bar apparatus showing that addition of copper powder increases the yield strength of the composite material significantly as compared to pure PLA, with both materials being strain rate sensitive. Also study [
63] conducted the strain rate sensitivity of five thermoplastic materials (PLA, ABS, PC, CPE+ and nylon) under various tensile test speeds to study strain rate influence on mechanical characteristics of FFF 3D-printed materials. The influence of strain rate on tensile strength and yield strength in dynamic conditions is examined. Compression behavior of 4D printed metamaterials with various Poisson's ratios in [
64] show the cellular metamaterials with zero Poisson's ratio possess superior vibration isolation capability compared to negative or positive Poisson's ratio cellular metamaterials at different deformation stages by a comprehensive analysis. A very detailed study presented in [
65] describes the influence of printing parameters on the mechanical response of poly-lactic-acid (PLA), high-impact-polystyrene (HIPS), and acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) with special reference to shape memory in a 4D print while stretching at different speeds and at different temperatures. In order to examine the tensile strain rate performance of 3D printed PLA with various printing orientation in paper [
66] conducted study using different deformation rates from the slowest to medium speed. The study, like most of the previous ones, shows different responses when the rate of deformation increases with an additional analysis of elongation and bending.
The aim of this paper is to extensively experimentally investigate the dependence of FFF printed PLA in a wide range of strain rates and temperatures in compression with large deformations. As due to high strain rates, test conditions can occur that are almost adiabatic, determining the existence of self heating in FFF PLA and the consequent additional softening, is a special challenge. All tests are carried out in coupled thermo-mechanical conditions so that the research results contribute to the expansion of knowledge in the field and provide new insight into the behavior of 4D printed PLA. There are several motivations for this study. The main motive is to determine all parameters related to macro mechanical characteristics of material, which will serve for the development of a coupled thermo-mechanical constitutive model for accurate modeling the behavior of the material using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Additionally, such an extensive study of coupled properties is not available to the authors' knowledge. The last and perhaps the most important motive is the possibility of expanding knowledge and further research in the field of auxetic structures, whose main mode of use and exploitation is radial and uniaxial compression at various strain rates. The study set up in this way could be the basis for successful and precise modeling of auxetics and metastructures in both cold and hot programming in consecutive research. The lower temperatures used in this research should serve to further focus on cold programming auxetics and research related to shape recovery by heating. Although the printing speeds and printing directions can also affect 4D printing properties, the focus of the study is on fully thermo-mechanically coupled characterization of PLA for the purposes of characterization and determination of characteristics for further development of the constitutive model.
In the Materials and Methods section, we present the rigorous materials and methods we used, such as filament used for 3D printing of samples, sample annealing procedure and uniaxial isothermal tensile filament and compression of cylindrical printed samples and DMTA. In the Results section we provide results obtained by uniaxial tensioning and uniaxial compression of samples obtained by 3D printing PLA as defined in previous section. Additionally, the results for DMTA analysis are provided. In Discussion section all results are discussed in the context of the paper main aims. We close in section Conclusion with most important findings and future suggestions.