Mechanical properties and anisotropy of expanded polystyrene foam sheet for the VLM-S rapid prototyping process

The mechanical properties of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam sheet were examined by several tests and the effects of material anisotropy were investigated by tensile and cutting test. Through the investigation, it was found that the material anisotropy results in a significant difference of mechanical properties of the sheet. Based on the results, the size of feeding material for variable lamination manufacturing (VLM-S) was determined and the operational cutting speed of the hotwire cutter was limited to the maximum cutting speed in the transverse direction.