Feasibility study of ultrasonic frequency application on fdm to improve parts surface finish

Abstract

Fuse Deposition Modeling (FDM) offer several advantages such as less expensive material, lack of expensive lasers and allows complex geometry to be built. However, FDM have limitations such as seam lines appear between layers and excess material residue, leading to surface roughness and poor finish. Ultrasound has been applied in various conventional machining process and shows good machined surface finish. However, from the literature review, it was found there is no investigation made on the application of ultrasound for Additive Manufacturing (AM) especially for FDM. This paper presents an adaptive approach to improve surface finish of FDM sample by applying ultrasonic vibration. The papers discuss the result of the surface finish of test piece printed via a desktop FDM system whereby an ultrasound device that was securely mounted onto the platform during printing process. Frequency that was used in the experiment is 11, 16 and 21 kHz with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) material. Optical microscope with the aid of pro VIS software version 2.90 was used to measure the surface roughness of the four samples printed with a vibration in the above specified frequency. It was found that a 21 kHz frequency applied to the FDM process achieved the best surface finish due to less surface defects found and thickness had finer layers being produced. The results from this study could potentially be applied to other AM system such as the selective laser sintering, electron beam machining and stereolithography. The new data on effects of ultrasonic FDM technique and machining parameter for achieving improved surface finish has potential benefit to be used in various industries such as automotive, consumer, medical, sports, etc to produce prototypes or customized end used product or part. The data will benefit in term of product design and development elimination of manual post processing. Further study that could be done is to use different types of material such as polyactic acid (PLA) or composite material.