Optimizing the Design for Additive Manufacturing Project in the Manufacturing Processes Lab Course Using the Taguchi Orthogonal Arrays

As 3D printing technology becomes more extensively used and more users have access to its immense potential, questions regarding which machine parameters affect the performance of the produced object arise.One of the primary projects taught and implemented in the Manufacturing Processes Lab course is the Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM).One of the key challenges I had when executing this procedure was determining how to optimize the 3D printing parameters and increase the quality of the manufactured items.In the other course, Design for Manufacturability (DfM), that I am teaching, I was presenting Taguchi Orthogonal Arrays and Quality Loss Functions (QLF) as tools for Design for Quality projects in the DfM course.In the Manufacturing Processes Lab course, I opted to use Taguchi Orthogonal Arrays to investigate the performance of the DfAM project in the Manufacturing processes course.This report seeks to address some of these 3D printing difficulties.The Taguchi Orthogonal Array (L8 (2 7 )) was performed 3D printing systems to assess the effects of 3D printer settings on part quality.In this evaluation, there are six factors (width, thickness, radius of fillets, temperature of nozzle, layer direction, and layer height) were investigated in this experiment, as well as one interaction between two factors.The width and layer height interaction were investigated.Three trials of eight distinct tensile strength experiments were performed to test the factors.The Taguchi orthogonal array was used to calculate the factors applied to each sample, and each factor was examined.The evaluation revealed that the width and thickness of the pieces were the most significant factors.Except for nozzle temperature, all lower values for the six parameters were shown to have a higher strength-to-weight ratio.The best signal-to-noise ratio was found in Experiment 1.When both parameters (width and layer height) were at Level 1 (lower values), the interaction between them was shown to be the best.Based on desirable qualities, the optimal strength-to-weight ratio was determined to be 35.09MPa/g.