In recent years, plastic and metal 3D printing has experienced massive development in the professional and hobby spheres, especially for rapid prototyping, reverse engineering, maintenance and quick repairs. However, this technology is limited by a number of factors, with the most common being the cost and availability of the technology but also the lack of information on material properties. This study focuses on investigating the material properties of PLA, PETG, HIPS, PA, ABS and ASA in order to elucidate their behavior in terms of wear and thermal resistance. The research builds on previous studies focusing on the mechanical properties of these materials and includes wear testing and DMA analysis. Weight loss, frictional forces, and frictional work including relative frictional work are recorded as part of this testing. The storage modulus and loss modulus including tan(δ) were then measured using DMA.

Modern industry should apply modern design in the construction of production facilities. This is typically the case with belt production, where parts are moved towards the worker, or when moving parts from the factory to the warehouse and shipping area. There is a relatively high energy consumption associated with moving these parts. The size of the consumption is mainly determined not only by the size of the transported components and the transport technology, but also by the design of the hoppers used for transport. One way to reduce material handling costs is to make the equipment used for moving parts more efficient. A more efficient carrier should, above all, be lighter. Topological optimization can serve very well for this weight reduction. Of course, the reduction in weight not only has an effect on lower power consumption, but also on the wear of other components. Hence, later in this article, we try to quantify these impacts and assess how much benefit the use of a modern designed carrier can bring. It is also important to consider the cost of producing new carriers versus modifying existing ones. The paper describes the application of the modern designed carrier and compares it with the existing carriers as well as modified existing carriers.

This study describes the statistical analysis of peak forces of industrial washing machines. The data source comes from twelve different machines. The measurements are done using a force gauge installed in places for fastening screws. A new software based on LabView has been developed to gauge the acting forces. To determine extreme force values, various probability distributions are applied. Furthermore, a convex combination of lognormal distribution is used in more complicated cases. The parameters of the lognormal mixtures are determined using modified an Expectation-maximization algorithm. Finally, the achieved results are interpreted with regard to the engineering design and to the operating reliability.