COMPARISON OF 3D-PRINTED PARTS’ QUALITY USING PRINTERS WITH “COREXY” AND “DELTA” KINEMATICS

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Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, describes technologies that manufacture parts by depositing thin layers of molten material on top of each other and creating the final part layer by layer. Each layer is built on the basis of geometry designed in CAD systems. Additive manufacturing technology opens up new design approaches: "design manufacturing" versus the traditional "design for manufacturing" approach. Geometric freedom allows you to design products as they are visualized, without manufacturing restrictions. Recently, 3D printers with Delta-type kinematics have gained popularity, which is an alternative to standard, cartesian 3D printers. These models use a more complex control system due to differences in the generation of print paths, but may have some advantages over a cartesian configuration. In order to expand the knowledge of additive manufacturing, a comparative study was conducted with cartesian and Delta printers to evaluate the printing performance of the test part. This article examines 3D printers with CoreXY and Delta kinematics, compares their characteristics, and identifies key differences in printing processes. As an example, for quality comparison, arbitrary parts printed in batches of three units from the same material with the same settings inside the slicer program were considered. Parts from both 3D printers were scanned using a LIDAR scanner, and the resulting scan models were transferred to a CAD environment for comparison. The results of the comparison were obtained by the shape and quality of the surface, the production time of one part and batch of parts, mass and dimensional characteristics. Looking at the results, it can be seen that the parts printed by the 3D printer with Delta kinematics have a better surface quality without post-processing, while the parts printed by the 3D printer with kinematics CoreXY correspond as closely as possible to the dimensions specified in the CAD model.