Three-dimensional printed plastic products developed through fused deposition modeling (FDM) endure long-term loading in most of the applications. The tensile creep behavior of such products is one of the imperative benchmarks to ensure dimensional stability under cyclic and dynamic loads. This research dealt with the optimization of the tensile creep behavior of 3D printed parts produced through fused deposition modeling (FDM) using polylactic acid (PLA) material. The geometry of creep test specimens follows the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM D2990) standards. Three-dimensional printing is performed on an open-source MakerBot desktop 3D printer. The Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is employed to predict the creep rate and rupture time by undertaking the layer height, infill percentage, and infill pattern type (linear, hexagonal, and diamond) as input process parameters. A total of 39 experimental runs were planned by means of a categorical central composite design. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results revealed that the most influencing factors for creep rate were layer height, infill percentage, and infill patterns, whereas, for rupture time, infill pattern was found significant. The optimized levels obtained for both responses for hexagonal pattern were 0.1 mm layer height and 100% infill percentage. Some verification tests were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the adopted RSM technique. The implemented research is believed to be a comprehensive guide for the additive manufacturing users to determine the optimum process parameters of FDM which influence the product creep rate and rupture time.

Advancement in electronic systems resulted in miniaturization and high-power densities. Therefore, the rate of heat generation in circuit board increased dramatically. To overcome the problem of overheating, numerous heat sink designs are proposed including L-shape fins heat sink. The thermo-fluidic flow behavior and temperature difference are analyzed to get better understanding of heat transfer from the sink to ambient air. Governing equations for the model of conjugate heat transfer in 3-D environment are solved and discretized across the computational domain. Numerous experiments are carried out to validate the numerical results. The effect of fin numbers, height, and heat sink size at three different input power is reported. Furthermore, ANOVA and Taguchi statistical methods are used to predict parameters that affect the heat transfer. The study revealed that fin height affects the heat transfer rate the most, and accounts for 25.3% increase in heat transfer rate. Optimization of the heat sink is carried out to ensure better efficiency of the proposed heat sink. The optimized conditions for the sink are observed to be heat sink size of 90 mm, 9 number of fins, and 33 mm of fin height.