Session: 02-01-04: 7th Annual Conference-Wide Symposium on Additive Manufacturing: Polymers II

Paper Number: 90251

90251 - Quality Control Study on 3D Printed Parts 

Additive manufacturing, specifically fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing, has received a lot of attention during the past few decades in different applications such as manufacturing, biomedical, or robotics. Although 3D printing was originally invented with the goal of providing prototyping capabilities to the field, it is currently used in different stages of product development process and is even responsible for manufacturing final products. Due to this increase in the use of 3D printing, there is a need to fabricate better parts. By the term better, we are referring to not only cosmetic and quality aspects but also the strength of the final products. In this paper, multiple parameters that can be modified in processing the CAD file before starting the 3D print job are studied simultaneously. This study is focused on assessing qualitative and quantitative studies. The three main parameters under study are: (1) retraction speed, (2) wall thickness, and (3) deposition angle. The quality of 3D printed parts were measured by: (1) surface quality, (2) dimensional accuracy, and (3) material strength. The dimensional accuracy testing at different position found that samples printing at 45 degrees from the z-axis had the least percent error for its measured lengths. The surface quality was heavily dependent on the retraction speed and angle from z-axis regardless of the number of walls. At high retraction speeds (i.e. 75 mm/s) , the surface quality was observed to either slightly or significantly increase depending on the position from the z-axis. The orientation from the z-axis at both 45 and 90 degrees displayed very consistent and high quality compared to when printing at 0 degrees. Overall, 45 degrees was the most optimal orientation for the high surface quality. For prints printed in the 0- and 45-degree orientation from the z-axis as the retraction speed increased there was a noticeable improvement in unsupported printing quality and vice versa. The overall quality was also heavily dependent on the retraction speed and position regardless of the number of walls present. In the orientation of 0 and 45 degrees as the retraction speed increased, the unsupported print quality increased. The 90 degrees orientation displayed very little variation when the retraction speed or number of walls was altered.  The tensile testing results found that the most optimal printing condition was when there were 2 walls at 75mm/s retraction speed which achieved the highest ultimate tensile strength at both 0 degrees from z-axis with 8214.7 psi and 90 from z-axis degrees with 7797.3 psi.

Presenting Author: Babak Eslami Widener University

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Babak Eslami is an expert in material characterization at different scales. During the past several years, his research focus has been on enhancing material properties for additive manufacturing. He does that by bringing his knowledge from material science and nanotechnology. Specifically, he has extensive research experience in atomic force microscopy and developing imaging techniques for polymers. He is currently an assistant professor at Mechanical Engineering Department at Widener University.

Authors:

Brandon Jackson Widener University
Kamran Fouladi Widener University
Babak Eslami Widener University