Modeling and analysis of surface roughness in fused deposition modeling based on infill patterns

This paper presents an approach of modeling for surface roughness of Polylactic Acid (PLA) polymer components printed with Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) based Additive Manufacturing (AM) process. With additive manufacturing technology one can build the components of metal, polymers and variety of composites with good dimensional accuracy. FDM is one of the additive manufacturing process which is used to build products of various polymers. In this investigation PLA components are built using FDM with different Infill Patterns viz. Zigzag, Triangles and Gyroid. Based on surface roughness measurement of components, predictive mathematical models for surface roughness are generated for different infill patterns. The analysis of surface roughness based on layer thickness and infill pattern is presented. The error between predictive surface roughness and experimental surface roughness ranges between 0.1 to 9.5%. For this investigation Gyroid infill pattern shows favourable results for surface roughness. The workable ranges for process parameter under investigation are infill percentage of 70 to 90 %, layer thickness of 0.2 to 0.22 mm and printing speed of 70 to 90 mm/s