Inference for Deformation and Interference in 3D Printing

• Activity Number: 131
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Arman Sabbaghi*+ and Tirthankar Dasgupta and Jizhe Zhang and Qiang Huang
• Companies: Harvard University and Harvard University and University of Southern California and University of Southern California
• Keywords: 3D printing ; additive manufacturing ; posterior predictive checks

Abstract

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is a promising manufacturing technique. Material solidification in the printing process leads to product deformation, which reduces the utility of printed products. Control of product deformations can be achieved by compensation plans. However, little attention has been paid to interference in compensation, which is thought to result from the inevitable discretization of a compensation plan. We investigate interference with an experiment involving the application of discretized compensations to cylinders. Our treatment illustrates a principled framework for detecting interference, and for addressing complications in modeling deformations under discretized compensations, which facilitates the study of printing processes. Properly defining experimental units and understanding interference are critical for quality control in complex engineering processes. Our work ultimately provides a step in that direction for 3D printing.