On twin screw extrusion parametric optimisation using hybrid approach of ANOVA and TOPSIS for 3D printing applications

In the last decade, several studies have been performed on the preparation of smart composite matrix materials by twin-screw extrusion (TSE) followed by its process parametric optimisation based on analysis of variance (ANOVA) for 3D printing applications. But, hitherto little has been reported on TSE process optimisation using a hybrid approach, that is, ANOVA in the first stage followed by a technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) in the second stage for multi-objective selection. In this study, an effort has been made to develop a feedstock filament of polylactic acid (PLA) based composite matrix (comprising polyvinyl chloride (PVC) - wood dust (WD), and Fe3O4 as reinforcement) with TSE. The result of the study suggests that the proposed hybrid model of analysis is more useful than the single approach (in which the user may first use the ANOVA technique for optimisation followed by TOPSIS for locating the best and worst parametric conditions). Finally, the correlation matrix has been prepared for the mechanical and magnetic properties of the PLA-PVC-WD- Fe3O4 composite matrix.