Title : Development of a digital engineering tool for estimating the impact of micro-defects on the mechanical response of 3D-printed filaments
Abstract:
In recent years, the construction sector has been developing efficient materials and technologies to support the real implementation of nearly zero-energy/emission and plus-energy buildings with high indoor environment quality. This last aspect is particularly important on health, comfort, productivity and, in general, the wellbeing of building occupants. Among the new design strategies that seek to meet these wellbeing requirements are 3D printed components, highlighting the process known as Fused filament fabrication (FFF). This is a 3D printing process where a filament of material is melted and deposited layer by layer to create a three-dimensional object. It should be noted that during this filament deposition process, micro-defects can arise, affecting both the quality and the mechanical properties of the component. To detect these errors, some manufacturers opt for an online monitoring of the production process by capturing images. As a result, rich information is captured through these images since the defects are categorised and dimensionally characterised by means of Machine Learning (ML) techniques [1]. However, the impact of the defects detected on the mechanical response is not addressed.
Within this background, a parametric Finite Element (FE) based approach has been developed in this work with the objective of analyzing the influence of the 3D FFF printing micro-defects on the mechanical response of the component. In the FE models, the geometrical dimensions of the defects (inputs) have been parametrized to relate them to the stiffness variation (output) that occurs in the filaments. Building on a Design of Experiments (DoE), results from a batch of simulations are used to generate metamodels for each type of defect, which could be further implemented in secondary applications, such as in line defect detection. In this work, a virtual digital tool, which is built from these metamodels, was developed to calculate, in real time, how the stiffness of the filaments varies as a function of the geometrical dimensions of the micro-defects.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- Our contribution provides the 3D printed manufacturing community a FE-based strategy to evaluate the impact of the defects on the mechanical response of the component
- FE-based tools can be used to create a virtual representation of a real operational environment. The numerical tool defined in this work culminates in an easy-to-use tool that make models accessible to industrial end-users
- The methodology presented could be expanded to other situations to obtain real-time estimations of a system or a process, based on a limited number of FE simulations or experimental results
- The methodology implemented is a powerful channel to provide an end-user-focused virtual environment to exploit the previous knowledge collected compiling rich data and can be used in multiple fields of science and technology
