Productivity Comparison Between Vat Polymerization and Fused Filament Fabrication Methods for Additive Manufacturing of Polymers

Many users relate additive manufacturing (AM) directly with fast and high-quality prototyping and manufacturing. Nevertheless, already within the different printing techniques there are significant printing time differences for the same polymer printed objects. For AM, there are currently two main known methods to three-dimensional (3D) print objects: One is the vat polymerization process using liquid crystal display (LCD) polymerization, also known as masked stereolithography (MSLA). The other is material extrusion, known as fused filament fabrication (FFF) or fused deposition modeling. Both processes can be found in the private sector (desktop printers) or in industry. The FFF and MSLA processes apply material layer by layer to 3D print objects, but both processes are different in their printing techniques. The different printing methods result in different printing speeds for the same 3D printed object. Geometry models are used to investigate which design elements affect the printing speed without changing the actual printing parameters. Support and infill are also taken into account. The influencing factors will be shown to optimize the printing time. With the assistance of the different slicer software, the influence factors were calculated and the different variants are pointed out. The determined correlations help to find the suitable printing technique to make optimum use of the printing performance of both technologies.