Proposal of an Innovative Benchmark for the Evaluation of 3D Printing Accuracy for Photopolymers

In recent years, the diffusion of additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing (3DP) techniques for polymers have been boosted by the expiration of earlier patents from the last century and the development of low-cost machines. Since these technologies become more widespread, there is a need to assess the capability and accuracy of low-cost machines in terms of dimensional and geometric tolerance. To this aim, this work proposes an innovative reference part for benchmarking layerwise processes that involve the curing of photopolymers. The geometry of the part is conceived to include several classical shapes that are easily measurable for defining the part accuracy in terms of ISO IT grades and GD&T values. Two replicas of the reference part were fabricated by stereolithography (SLA) and digital light processing (DLP) using two machines and related proprietary materials by Sharebot Company. The replicas were printed with a layer thickness of 50 μm for the DLP process and 100 μm for the SLA one. The results of dimensional measurements of the replicas, that were carried out using a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM), show that the geometric accuracy of the time-consuming DLP process is slightly better than that of stereolithography.