Development of an Extraction Hood for Efficient Chip Collection during the Finishing Process of FFF 3D Printed Parts

Abstract

Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) has seen a rise in popularity for industrial and research applications due to freedom of design, comparably small costs and a short manufacturing time. However, the achievable surface quality and dimensional accuracy is still limited due to a hard to control and uncertain extrusion process. Thus, hybrid manufacturing offers the potential to improve the accuracy and roughness with subtractive manufacturing. Although several researchers have focused on recycling filament of defective prints, the recycling aspect of chips resulting from hybrid manufacturing did not receive the same attention. That is why in this work an initial step is taken for enabling an additional source for filament recycling by designing a chip collector. To optimize the capability of the system a systematic simulation-based design process is carried out. Particle trajectories obtained from high-speed video recordings were evaluated by means of particle tracking velocimetry (PTV). Subsequently two design concepts of an extraction hood were developed and analyzed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Additionally, particle trajectories were calculated and evaluated. Based on the simulation results one flow optimized concept is chosen which offers a simulated chip extraction rate of 99.9 %.