IMPROVING THE SURFACE FINISH OF FDM BASED ABS AND SLM BASED AlSi10Mg SPECIMENS: A CASE STUDY

Naveh Dresler 1 Dana Ashkenazi 2 Alexandra Inberg 3 Yosi Shacham-Diamand 3 Adin Stern 1,4
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Afeka Academic College of Engineering, Tel-Aviv, 69107, Israel
2School of Mechanical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, 6997801, Israel
3School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 6997801, Israel
4Department of Materials Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, 8410501, Israel

Additive manufacturing (AM) is defined as manufacturing processes developed for joining preferred materials by printing layer upon layer to form three-dimensional objects. The popularity of AM technologies has significantly accelerated in the last decade. Fused deposition modelling (FDM) is an AM technology of producing objects by extruding wires of molten polymers. Selective LASER melting (SLM) is a rapid AM technology uses a power density laser to melt and joint metallic powder.

This research aims to investigate the surface finish of objects manufactured by AM technologies:

  1. ABS parts produced by FDM followed by chemical vapor smoothing (CVS) as a post-processing stage.
  2. AlSi10Mg parts produced by SLM after silver coating (SC) as a post-processing stage.

The study highlights that orientation and density have a significant effect on the surface finish at the pre-processing stage of FDM. However, after post-processing with CVS, there is hardly any influence on the final properties of the objects. In some cases of printed parts additional coating is needed to protect the printed device from corrosion, to improve its electrical properties or according to decoration considerations. Such coating can be used for coins replicas for museum exhibitions. For this purpose, SC was prepared on AlSi10Mg-SLM coins to improve surface quality and appearance. Simple and non-expensive electroless plating with different pre-deposition treatments was applied. Preliminary results show good quality and appearance SC of the printed coins. The results have been verified by performing the experiments on specimens printed in Z and X-Y directions.









Powered by Eventact EMS