3d printing of quadcopter: A Case Study

Additive manufacturing (AM) popularly known as Rapid Prototyping (RP) or 3D Printing technology has primarily been developed for the manufacturing Industry to assist in speeding up the development of new products.The objective of this paper is to design and fabricate Quadcopter components in 3D printing using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technique and using Co-ordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) carrying out the dimensional error analysis of manufactured parts. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a RP (rapid prototyping) technique used to manufacture prototypes on additive manufacturing technology. The Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is one of the rapid prototyping technologies by which physical objected are created directly from CAD data. The quality of FDM fabricated parts are significantly affected by various process parameter used in this process. So it is necessary to optimize the process parameter of FDM to improve the quality of the parts. Primary process parameters such as layer thickness and part orientation in addition to their interactions are studied and analyzed in the present dissertation that influences the dimensional accuracy of the part produced by the process of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). Due to shrinkage of the filaments, the dimensions of the CAD model does not match with the FDM processed part. The shrinkage dominates along length, width and thickness of the build part. The error is analyzed and advancements are discussed. The 3D printed components are measured with CMM along lengthwise, width and thickness. The error obtained is the deviation between the CAD model and the 3D printed parts are noted. It has been found that there is difference in physical dimensions of the part which required to be minimized by correcting the process parameters.