Additive Manufacturing of Large Size Parts Through Retrofitment of Three-Axes CNC Machining Centre

Abstract

The size of the additive manufactured parts limits their use in prototyping and small functional applications. Additive Manufacturing (AM) systems with large build volume are relatively costly as compared to small ones. However, the use of existing three-axis CNC machining centres could provide an alternative for large-size parts fabrication at a minimal cost. Therefore, the present paper investigates the possibilities for the additive manufacturing of large-size parts using retrofitted three-axis CNC machining centre. A CNC-assisted extrusion deposition based AM system has been used. The setup consists of a material processing tool (MPT) and large-size build platform. Initial experiments have been conducted to check the feasibility of the developed setup for large-size parts. Large parts with different cross-sections were fabricated by processing ABS material in pellet form. Moreover, characterization was carried out to analyse the quality of fabricated parts. The observed results show that developed setup has potential to fabricates large-size parts in future.