Experimentally validated modeling of the temperature distribution and the distortion during the Fused Filament Fabrication process

This paper presents the numerical approach to compute process-induced temperature distribution and distortion in Polylactic Acid (PLA) parts manufactured using the Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) process. Thermal simulations are performed first to compute the time-dependent temperature distribution which is then input as solution-independent boundary condition into a mechanical simulation to compute warpage of the manufactured part. The developed procedure used experimentally measured process parameters and was experimentally verified at each step of the simulation.

The thermal step in the simulation workflow was experimentally validated using thermography yielding quantitative predictions for 25 out of 27 considered points with the highest accuracy of < 1 °C. To verify mechanical step, the computed process-induced distortions were compared against those measured with an optical 3D scanner. The developed procedure yielded qualitative and, in some cases, quantitative predictions of process-induced geometrical distortions.