Effect of Printing Orientation on Product Quality and Overall Process Efficiency: an Experimental Investigation

Abstract:

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies, also known as 3D printing, are increasingly used to produce usable and appealing end products. Besides allowing greater design freedom, 3D printing can increase material efficiency and drastically reduce production time. However, processes are still lacking in the quality of products. Among dozens of parameters that can influence the printing process, the study analyses the impact of the printing orientation (PO) on the product's geometrical accuracy and the process's overall efficiency. An experimental analysis has been designed and executed. A Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) machine has been used to print the specimens. In particular, the experimental results showed the influence of PO on the geometrical characteristics of the specimens (bending angle, torsion angle, deviations, flatness tolerance and thickness). Moreover, the variability of production time, cost and resource consumption by varying PO has been investigated. As expected, the worst geometrical performance is shown by upright specimens. Furthermore, the ANOVA analysis underlines that only the orientation of the specimen with respect to the Z-axes (flat, on-edge and up-right) is statistically significant for the geometrical accuracy of the specimens. The method ELECTRE I has been used as Multi Criteria Decision-Making Method to rank the build configurations according to the resulting product's geometrical accuracy, the process performance and decision-maker’s priorities.

• Periodical: Key Engineering Materials (Volume 958)
• Pages: 57-66
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/p-Gbo5cc
• Online since: October 2023
• Authors: Alessandro Greco, Pasquale Manco*, Marcello Fera, Piera Maresca, Salvatore Gerbino
• Keywords: Accuracy, Additive Manufacturing, Build Orientation, FDM

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