Experimental investigation on shore hardness of barrel-finished FDM patterns

Abstract

Barrel finishing (BF) process is widely used to improve the surface finish and dimensional features of metallic and non-metallic parts using different types of media. As a matter of fact the change in shore hardness (SH) features of fused deposition modelling (FDM)-based master pattern is one of the important considerations from its service point of view. The main objective of present research work is to investigate the effect of BF process on SH of acrylonitrile–butadiene–styrene (ABS)-based master patterns prepared by FDM. Six controllable parameters of FDM and BF, namely, geometry of prototype, layer density, part orientation, types of BF media, weight of media and finish cycle time, were studied using Taguchi’s L18 orthogonal array in order to find their effect on SH of master pattern. Results indicated that process parameters significantly affect the SH of master patterns. It has been found that FDM part layer density contributed the maximum (about 67.52%) for SH of master patterns.