Design evaluation on the production of sloping walls without support structures in additive manufacturing

• Autor(a) principal: Lemos, Inês Carolina Ribeiro
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/3770
• topic: Additive manufacturing; FDM; Support material; Sloping walls; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Technologies have been advancing significantly over the years. Additive manufacturing is a technology that is in constant growth in the matter of applications, materials, processes and machines. In spite of its advanced technology, in most cases the produced models need to build with support structures which slows down production. Hence it is necessary to understand this type of limitation. Additive manufacturing has the ability of producing geometrical parts from a CAD model, creating rapidly physical models by joining materials, layer by layer, to represent models or even to test its functionality. It is capable of printing geometrical complex parts with an extended design freedom, but in some systems, needs to build support structures to support the part during production. The FDM technology is one of the additive manufacturing processes that produces the model by connecting polymeric materials one layer at a time. The machine software reads and manipulates the STL file to define all the proper conditions to print the required model, as well as defining the need to build support structures. It is relevant to establish design guidelines to achieve an improved result. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to evaluate the need of support structures in a set of defined models with designated geometric characteristics. The work consisted in producing models with sloping walls using the FDM process in different machines in order to understand the different behaviours of the shapes and to conclude at which point it is possible to produce a geometric feature without support structures while maintaining geometric accuracy.