Forecasting warping deformation using multivariate thermal time series and k-nearest neighbors in fused deposition modeling

Abstract

Over the past decades, additive manufacturing has rapidly advanced due to its advantages in enabling diverse material usage and complex design production. Nevertheless, the technology has limitations in terms of quality, as printed products are sometimes different from their desired designs or are inconsistent due to defects. Warping deformation, a defect involving layer shrinkage induced by the thermal residual stress generated during manufacturing processes, is a major factor in lowering the quality and raising the cost of printed products. This study utilized a variety of thermal time series data and the K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm with dynamic time warping (DTW) to detect and predict the warping deformation in the printed parts using fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers. Multivariate thermal time series data extracted from thermocouples were trained using DTW-based KNN to classify warping deformation. The results showed that the proposed approach can predict warping deformation with an accuracy of over 80% by only using thermal time series data corresponding to 20% of the whole printing process. Additionally, the classification accuracy exhibited the promising potential of the proposed approach in warping prediction and in actual manufacturing processes, so the additional time and cost resulting from defective processes can be reduced.