Effect of Process Parameters on Energy Consumption, Physical, and Mechanical Properties of Fused Deposition Modeling.

Emmanuel U. Enemuoh,Venkata G. Menta,Stefan Duginski,Connor Feyen

doi:10.3390/polym13152406

Emmanuel U. Enemuoh, Venkata G. Menta + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13152406

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Abstract

The application of the fused deposition modeling (FDM) additive manufacturing process has increased in the production of functional parts across all industries. FDM is also being introduced for industrial tooling and fixture applications due to its capabilities in building free-form and complex shapes that are otherwise challenging to manufacture by conventional methods. However, there is not yet a comprehensive understanding of how the FDM process parameters impact the mechanical behavior of engineered products, energy consumption, and other physical properties for different material stocks. Acquiring this information is quite a complex task, given the large variety of possible combinations of materials–additive manufacturing machines–slicing software process parameters. In this study, the knowledge gap is filled by using the Taguchi L27 orthogonal array design of experiments to evaluate the impact of five notable FDM process parameters: infill density, infill pattern, layer thickness, print speed, and shell thickness on energy consumption, production time, part weight, dimensional accuracy, hardness, and tensile strength. Signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed on the experimental data to quantify the parameters’ main effects on the responses and establish an optimal combination for the FDM process. The novelty of this work is the simultaneous evaluation of the effects of the FDM process parameters on the quality performances because most studies have considered one or two of the performances alone. The study opens an opportunity for multiobjective function optimization of the FDM process that can be used to effectively minimize resource consumption and production time while maximizing the mechanical and physical characteristics to fit the design requirements of FDM-manufactured products.

Highlights

Additive manufacturing (AM) can be defined as the process of making products by joining engineering materials layer upon layer using computer-aided design (CAD) data [1]
They reported that the mechanical properties of fused deposition modeling (FDM) prints in the upright orientation will increase with an increase in layer thickness and decrease with an increase in feed rate
The responses obtained from the experiments were analyzed using a graphical representation of the means effects and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the FDM quality characteristics

Summary

Introduction

Additive manufacturing (AM) can be defined as the process of making products by joining engineering materials layer upon layer using computer-aided design (CAD) data [1]. Dey and Yodo conducted extensive reviews of the state-of-the-art literature on the influence of FDM parameters on part qualities and the existing work on FDM process parameter optimization [5] They concluded from their review that polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) were the most widely used materials for producing functional parts with FDM. They identified the shortcomings and challenges of existing works and evaluated opportunities to work in the FDM additive manufacturing field and suggested directions for future research in this field. The flatness error and surface roughness were not significantly influenced by the FDM nozzle diameter [8]

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