Permeability Analysis of Polymeric Porous Media Obtained by Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing

Porous media (PM) are used in many applications, and their geometry and hydraulic properties are essential in flow analysis, especially in geology (oil and gas) and medical (tissue engineering) applications. Additive Manufacturing (AM) enables the production of planned porosity and the material extrusion AM allows working with process parameters to produce lattice type geometries, without the need to have a 3D model of the internal porous structure. This work presents a preliminary study on the permeability of some PM designs obtained in PLA using an in-house process-planning software. Two main filling variations of the raster strategies were studied, one considering the displacement of staggered layers and the other involving a new joined filaments proposal. The permeability obtained experimentally is compared with numerical outputs. The results indicate that both filling strategies influence the PM permeability, but this was more significant with the joined filaments approach.