Monitoring the liberation of volatile organic compounds during fused deposition modeling three dimensional printing using solid-phase microextraction coupled to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.

Three-dimensional (3D) printers have gained tremendous popularity and are being widely used in offices, laboratories, and private homes. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is among the most commonly used mechanisms by desktop 3D printers in indoor settings and relies on the extrusion and deposition of heated thermoplastic filaments, resulting in the liberation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). With the growing use of 3D printers, concerns regarding human health have risen as the exposure to VOCs may cause adverse health effects. Therefore, it is important to monitor VOC liberation during printing and to correlate it to filament composition. In this study, VOCs liberated with a desktop printer were measured by solid-phase microextraction (SPME) combined with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). SPME fibers featuring sorbent coatings of varied polarity were chosen for the extraction of VOCs liberated from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), tough polylactic acid, and copolyester+ (CPE+) filaments. It was found that for all three filaments tested, longer print times resulted in a greater number of extracted VOCs. The ABS filament liberated the most VOCs while the CPE+ filaments liberated the fewest VOCs. Through the use of hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis, filaments as well as fibers could be differentiated based on the liberated VOCs. This study demonstrates that SPME is a promising tool to sample and extract VOCs liberated during 3D printing under non-equilibrium conditions and can be used to aid in tentative identification of the VOCs when coupled to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.