Geometric precision analysis for Additive Manufacturing processes: A comparative study

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has recently attracted increasing attention among manufacturing industries. This class of technologies is capable of creating parts with complex shapes and intricate structures. However, the poor geometric quality of the parts they produced is a major constraint in wide industrial adoption. Currently available analytical techniques based on classic measurement equipment could fail in analyzing the process parameters based on AM-created parts because of the layer-by-layer fabrication process. In this article, we introduce a novel three-dimensional point-cloud-based analytical toolset, volumetric data analysis (VDA), for AM-oriented metrological and experimental analysis. Each step of the VDA is discussed in detail. A high dimensional hypothesis testing procedure is proposed to compare the geometric precision of the part samples from two printing settings. New visualization tools for deviation diagnostics are presented to aid in interpreting and comparing the process outputs. The proposed methods are illustrated with a real experiment to compare the effects of different layer thicknesses in a filament deposition modeling printing process.