ON THE SURFACE ROUGHNESS OF 3D PRINTED PARTS WITH FDM BY A LOW-BUDGET COMMERCIAL PRINTER

Abstract

As additive manufacturing machines price is decreasing, while, at the same time, the expertise in the relevant field is rising, it is essential to test and evaluate the low-budget machines that are available for commercial use. Whilst low-budget machines are widely utilized for rapid prototyping and experimentation, they are not capable of producing parts with high surface quality and achieve high levels of repeatability due to low quality hardware and not optimized software. Having said that, the main aim of the current study is to experiment with a low budget Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D-Printer, and evaluate the surface roughness of the printed parts in respect to the angle from the print plate. Polylactic Acid (PLA) was chosen as filament material, while the printed parts surface roughness was measured according to the ISO ASTM 52902-2021 standard. The surface roughness was estimated in terms of the Ra and Rz values, while a statistical analysis was implemented in order some interesting conclusions to be deduced regarding the correlation between part orientation and surface quality.