THE EFFECT OF DIFFERENT SLICING SOFTWARE ON THE MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE OF 3D PRINTED PARTS

Abstract

Plastic 3D printing is currently in-trend for producing custom parts and products with intricate geometry. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is one of the preferred technologies, as it requires a simple operation with affordable equipment setup. Previous studies have achieved many breakthroughs in using FFF. To successfully produce parts using the FFF machine, a slicing software is required to provide instructions to the machine. Currently, numerous slicing software are available in the market that can be integrated to the FFF machine. Each slicing software has a slightly different performance compared with others. Therefore, careful consideration should be taken when choosing the most suitable slicing software for the machine in use. In this work, three slicing software, namely, Ultimaker Cura 4.8.0, Cura 2.7.0, and PrusaSlicer have been chosen to investigate their effect on the manufacturing performance of 3D printed parts. The parameters for evaluating manufacturing performance were accuracy of the slicing software in predicting printing time, the dimensional accuracy of the printed parts, and the surface roughness of the printed parts. The effect of printing speed was also investigated at three levels, which were at 20, 40, and 60 mm/s. In this work, the 3D Espresso F220 machine was used. The geometry of the printed parts followed the ASTM D638 Type I geometry using polylactic acid (PLA) filament material. The results showed that Ultimaker Cura 4.8.0 can produce the best results, if the priority of the producer is to use a software with high accuracy in printing time prediction and better surface quality. However, if the priority of the process is to produce small dimensional errors (close tolerance to designed geometry), the characteristics of the dimension (length, width, or thickness) need to be identified. Ultimaker Cura 4.8.0 produced small errors when the critical dimension was width, but Cura 2.7.0 was good for length dimension, while PrusaSlicer was good for thickness dimension. The results also showed that printing speed can affect the time of completion of the printed parts and the surface quality. The lowest printing speed was able to produce parts with better surface quality; however, printing time can become longer.