Surface Roughness Quality and Dimensional Accuracy—A Comprehensive Analysis of 100% Infill Printed Parts Fabricated by a Personal/Desktop Cost-Effective FDM 3D Printer

Fused deposition modeling (FDM) has become widely used for personal/ desktop cost-effective printers. This work presents an investigational platform, which is used to study the surface roughness quality, and dimensional accuracy of 100% infill density printed parts fabricated by a personal/desktop cost-effective FDM 3D printer using different types of thermoplastic filament materials namely, PLA, PLA+, ABS and ABS+. Varieties of experiments were conducted after the fabricated parts were naturally cooled down for at least three hours to room temperature. During printing work, the nozzle diameter, layer height, nozzle temperature and printing speed were set at 0.3 mm, 0.1 mm, 220°C and 30 mm/s, respectively. According to the experimentally obtained data results over 10 mm scanned profile and 90° measuring direction (perpendicular to building direction), PLA+ thermoplastic filament material shows an excellent surface behaviour and is found to be more accurate while ABS does exhibit high surface roughness, waviness and primary behaviour. Both PLA and ABS+ show good surface performance.

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