Development of Correction Factors for FDM 3D Printers: Experimental Investigation and ANN Modelling

While additive manufacturing is already applied in industry in different varieties, even simple and widespread techniques such as the fused filament fabrication (FFF) process are still not fully understood in terms of influence of printing parameters or part orientation on the quality of fabricated parts. A main issue for using FFF in a reliable manner is the dimensional control of printed parts in comparison to the initially planned model. In this study the influence of printing parameters, part positioning on the printing platform as well as the use of different printer models has been evaluated in order to find correction factors for an optimised FFF process for high precision parts. The investigation has been carried out with two common printing materials (ABS and PLA) and printing tests have been conducted on two different FFF printers to evaluate the influence of hardware differences. Examination of the gathered data showed a substantial scattering of measured results, making the application of correction factors difficult, but not impossible. In addition, to predict the outcome of future prints a modelling approach using an artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm is presented. ... mehrThe developed ANN model paves the way for identifying a processing window, 3D printing parameters and correction factors for an optimised FFF process for high precision printed parts.