Process parameter optimization for fabrication of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene parts

Abstract

Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), a popular 3D printing process is suitable for fabricating not only prototypes but functional components as well. Quality of FDM printed functional parts depends on right setting of printing parameters. This study is conducted to optimize various FDM print parameters, namely layer thickness (LT), build orientation (BO), raster angle (RA) and raster width (RW) for dimensional accuracy of Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) parts using the Taguchi’s design of experiment approach. Experiments are designed using Taguchi’s L9 (34) orthogonal array for four factors at three levels each. Signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio is utilised to identify the optimum levels and rank of the parameters and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to estimate the percentage contribution of individual parameters. LT1 (0.127 mm), BO1 (0°), RA3 (60°) and RW2 (0.456 mm) were identified as optimal parameters for dimensional accuracy. An ANOVA of the S/N ratios suggests that BO isthe most significant factor with a contribution of 75.89%; LT and RW were the second and third contributors, with 11.87% and 10.40%, respectively. The predicted values obtained through a linear regression model have also showed good agreement with the experimental values with a maximum deviation of 0.27%.