Additive manufacturing, as a general concept referring to technologies that allow the user to manufacture in situ desired geometries based on a digital CAD file, by introducing material into the manufacturing environment, have experienced a relevant expansion during the last years. The works published by Ramón Jerez et al. in this journal are the results of several months of work, testing cylindrical specimens to rotating bending fatigue, in order to know the influence of parameter selection to obtain the best behaviour of these kind of pieces. 

The paper applies Taguchi experimental design and ANOVA postprocessing to evaluate the influence of different manufacturing parameters on the results, namely, layer height, nozzle diameter, printing velocity, and infill pattern and compactness.

The main results found in this paper evidence that the layer height, nozzle diameter and fill density are the main influencing parameters, whereas the printing velocity and the pattern did not show a statistically significant influence on the fatigue life of the tested specimens. These three parameters were also found the most robust ones, at sight of the signal-to-noise ratio associated to their response. Consequently, the paper proposes a parameter set that could be selected by users to improve the quality of the printed parts.

The paper has been published in open access, and can be consulted in the following doi: 10.3390/ma11122521