Digital Design and Manufacturing with Thermomechanical Process Simulation for Fused Filament Fabrication 3D Printing

Abstract

Recent demonstrations with fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printing has shown to produce protypes as well as production components. Additionally, due to the FFF process platforms being low-cost and readily available there has been a high-demand to produce on-demand parts for various applications in automotive, in-space manufacturing and electronic industries. However, current limitations such as limited availability of advanced composites materials, and guidelines for designfor- manufacturing make the process prone to trial-and-error experiments both at the materials development, product design and manufacturing stage. In this work, new thermomechanical process simulations platform, Digimat-AM has been evaluated to address and demonstrate digital design and manufacturing of FFF process by performing simulation and experiments. With the use of Acrylonitrile butadiene (ABS) material as a basis, a L9 Taguchi design-of-experiment (DOE) was setup by varying key process input parameters for FFF 3D printing such as layer thickness, melt temperature and extrusion multiplier were varied for three levels. A total of 9 DOE simulations and experiments were performed to compare part properties such as dimensions, warpage, and print time were analysed. Additionally, ANOVA analysis was performed to identify the optimum and the worst conditions for printing and correlate them with their effect on mechanical properties of the printed samples. Furthermore, from the simulation results, a reverse warpage geometry, 3D model was generated that factors for part warpage, shrinkage, or other defects to enable 3D printing parts to design dimensions. Subsequently, using the generated reversed warpage geometry was used to perform 3D printed experiments and analysed for part dimensions and defects. As a case study, a functional prototype [Two different geometries] was designed and simulated on Digimat-AM and using the above guide, 3D printing was performed to obtain part to specific dimensions.