Contact Image Sensor integration in Fused Filament Fabrication machines for layer inspection

Abstract

One of the limiting factors for industrial application of additive manufacturing (AM) is the lack of geometrical accuracy of manufactured parts. To improve precision, non-contact sensors should be integrated into AM machines, capable of performing in-situ inspection of the part and being able to detect and compensate for the actual geometrical errors. A non-contact digitizing system is proposed in this work for the inspection of the deposited material layers, based on a Contact Image Sensor (CIS) extracted from a commercial flatbed paper scanner. In order to integrate this sensor in an AM machine, a methodology was developed that includes the sensor operation analysis, the design of the necessary hardware and software to be externally controlled and the subsequent processing of the captured images. Results prove that the CIS sensor can be integrated in any device external to the original scanner.