Bio-Inspired Technology Group (BITE), Department BioMechanical Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime, and Materials Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
Department of Electronic and Mechanical Support Division (DEMO), Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2023 Aug 15;18(8):e0289730. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289730. eCollection 2023.
Parts produced with metal additive manufacturing often suffer from a poor surface finish. Surface finishing techniques are effective to improve the quality of 3D printed surfaces, however they have as downsides that they also slightly change the geometry of the part, in an unpredictable way. This effect on the geometrical features of complex parts has received little attention. In this research, we illustrate a method to visualize the impact of surface finishing techniques on geometrical features, as well as their effectiveness on parts with high shape-complexity, by using centrifugal disk finishing as a case study. We designed and 3D printed test parts with different features using selective laser melting, which were coated with a blue metal lacquer prior to polishing. After polishing, the blue lacquer was eroded away from the spots that were easily reached by the polishing process, yet had remained on the surfaces that could not be reached by the process. We used measurements of material removal and image processing of the remaining blue lacquer on the surfaces to analyze these effects. Using this method, we were able to derive a number of specific design guidelines that can be incorporated while designing metal AM parts for centrifugal disk finishing. We suggest that this visualization method can be applied to different polishing methods to gain insight into their influence, as well as being used as an aid in the design process.
采用金属增材制造技术生产的零件表面质量往往较差。表面处理技术是提高 3D 打印表面质量的有效方法，但它们也存在缺点，即会以不可预测的方式略微改变零件的几何形状。对于复杂零件的几何特征，这种影响还没有得到太多关注。在这项研究中，我们通过使用离心盘抛光作为案例研究，说明了一种可视化表面处理技术对几何特征的影响及其对高形状复杂性零件的有效性的方法。我们使用选择性激光熔化设计并打印了具有不同特征的测试零件，然后在抛光前用蓝色金属漆对其进行了涂层。抛光后，蓝色涂料从容易被抛光过程触及的地方被侵蚀掉，但仍留在无法被该过程触及的表面上。我们使用材料去除测量和表面残留蓝色涂料的图像处理来分析这些效果。通过使用这种方法，我们能够得出一些在为离心盘抛光设计金属增材制造零件时可以采用的具体设计准则。我们建议可以将这种可视化方法应用于不同的抛光方法，以了解它们的影响，同时也可以在设计过程中作为辅助手段。
