Sillani Francesco, Schiegg Ramis, Schmid Manfred, MacDonald Eric, Wegener Konrad
Inspire, Innovation Center for Additive Manufacturing Switzerland (ICAMS), Fürstenlandstrasse 122, 9014 St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Institute of Machine Tools and Manufacturing (IWF), ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
Polymers (Basel). 2021 Dec 26;14(1):81. doi: 10.3390/polym14010081.
Powder bed fusion of polymers is becoming increasingly adopted by a variety of industries to tailor the strength, weight and functionality of end-use products. To meet the high standards of the modern manufacturing industry, parts built with powder bed fusion require consistent properties and to be free of defects, which is intrinsically connected to the quality of the powder bed prior to melting. The hypothesis of this work is that the roughness of the top surface of an unmelted powder bed can serve as a proxy for the powder bed density, which is known to correlate with final part density. In this study, a laser line scan profilometer is integrated onto the recoater arm of a custom powder test bench, which is able to automatically create layers of powder. A diverse group of polymers was investigated including polyamide 12 (PA12), polyamide 11 (PA11), polypropylene (PP), and a thermoplastic elastomer (TPU) under different recoating speed in order to increase the variance of the dataset. Data analytics were employed to compare roughness to measured powder bed density and a statically significant correlation was established between them.
聚合物的粉末床熔融正越来越多地被各种行业采用，以定制最终产品的强度、重量和功能。为了满足现代制造业的高标准，通过粉末床熔融制造的零件需要具备一致的性能且无缺陷，这与熔融前粉末床的质量有着内在联系。本研究的假设是，未熔融粉末床顶面的粗糙度可以作为粉末床密度的替代指标，而粉末床密度已知与最终零件密度相关。在本研究中，将激光线扫描轮廓仪集成到一个能够自动铺粉的定制粉末测试台的铺粉臂上。研究了包括聚酰胺12（PA12）、聚酰胺11（PA11）、聚丙烯（PP）和热塑性弹性体（TPU）在内的多种聚合物，在不同的铺粉速度下进行实验，以增加数据集的差异。采用数据分析方法将粗糙度与测量得到的粉末床密度进行比较，并在它们之间建立了具有统计学意义的相关性。
