This study investigates the mechanical and physical properties of a wood-based polymer composite DuraSense® 3D S50 Flex K to enhance its potential in large-scale additive manufacturing by studying the influence of printing orientation on the mechanical characteristics of the product. To assess performance, the specimens were produced with different printing layer orientations: at 0°, 30°, 45°, and 90° to the sample length, which corresponds to load application during the tests. Tensile strength, flexural strength, modulus of elasticity, hardness, water absorption, thermophysical properties and microstructure were determined for the samples. The 0° specimens exhibited the highest tensile (15.39 MPa) and flexural strength (26.05 MPa), while the 90° orientation specimens showed reductions in strength of 72% and 69%, respectively. The modulus of elasticity also decreased by 71% at 90°, confirming anisotropy. Additional tests revealed a Brinell hardness of 179.9 N/mm ² , a water absorption of 19.75%, with minimal dimensional change, and a thermal conductivity of 0.1553 W/m·K. Microscopic analysis showed porosity and uneven fibre distribution, indicating the need for composite optimisation. These findings confirm the importance of orientation-aware design in large-scale additive manufacturing and provide the background for future work focusing on the development of printing strategies and computational modelling to enhance print quality, interlayer adhesion, and performance in applications.

The present experimental investigation proposes an image-based assessment method for the automatic detection and measurement of convex end wear in cylindrical brass electrodes used during Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) of AISI 314 steel plate workpieces. Minitab was utilized to determine the total number of experiments required for this study. The MATLAB Image Processing Toolbox was employed to classify and process images of cylindrical brass electrodes for extracting the data required in the data acquisition operation. The main objective of this study is to utilize a non-contact measurement system, along with a relatively low-cost instrumentation, to compute and evaluate the wear in cylindrical brass electrodes. The obtained wear values demonstrated that there is a slight skewed between the wear determined using a digitized caliper tool and the proposed image-assisted wear measurement, which validated the introduced method. The percentage of deviation between the proposed method and the method used by the digitized caliper tool-assisted wear measurement is 0.06.