Surface roughness investigation of poly-jet 3D printing

Abstract

An experimental investigation of the surface quality of the Poly-Jet 3D printing (PJ-3DP) process is presented. PJ-3DP is an additive manufacturing process, which uses jetted photopolymer droplets, which are immediately cured with ultraviolet lamps, to build physical models, layer-by-layer. This method is fast and accurate due to the mechanism it uses for the deposition of layers as well as the 16 microns of layer thickness used. To characterize the surface quality of PJ-3DP printed parts, an experiment was designed and the results were analyzed to identify the impact of the deposition angle and blade mechanism motion onto the surface roughness. First, linear regression models were extracted for the prediction of surface quality parameters, such as the average surface roughness (Ra) and the total height of the profile (Rt) in the X and Y directions. Then, a Feed Forward Back Propagation Neural Network (FFBP-NN) was proposed for increasing the prediction performance of the surface roughness parameters Ra and Rt. These two models were compared with the reported ones in the literature; it was revealed that both performed better, leading to more accurate surface roughness predictions, whilst the NN model resulted in the best predictions, in particular for the Ra parameter.