Dynamic compensation system development for advanced 3D printing and its evaluation

Abstract

With the recent spread of 3D printing, its application has been widely discussed from automotive industries to small-scale and individual manufacturing. In general, additive manufacturing is used as a 3D printing process. Using this process, defects in one layer can easily spread to the next layer, deteriorating the overall quality of the final product. Therefore, to ensure the quality of 3D printers while maintaining a large workspace, it is important to monitor the process online. In this paper, a coarse-to-fine strategy is implemented for Fused Deposition Modeling via the dynamic compensation module attached to an industrial robot arm, and the 3D printer-specific multi-ROIs image processing method is proposed for printing monitoring and compensation. The dynamic compensation module consists of two high-speed cameras, an extruder, and a 2-axis actuator that can monitor previously printed material to compensate for the movement of the main system as a high-frequency sub-system. For evaluation of the developed system, a defection detecting test using the multi-ROIs method and dynamic compensation tool path planning test was made. Consequently, it was shown that the dynamic compensation system can be applied by dynamic compensation of the developed 3D printer system, and the prediction and inspection can be made simultaneously by using the multi-ROIs method.