Development of artificial intelligence‐based neural network prediction model for responses of additive manufactured polylactic acid parts

Abstract Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is one of the most economical and popular technology amongst numerous additive manufacturing techniques. The quality of FDM fabricated parts is highly sensitive to the production parameters. Thus, in the present work, an investigation on the FDM printed polylactic acid parts has been performed considering six printing process parameters, that is, nozzle diameter, build orientation, raster pattern, layer height and print speed to develop the feedforward backpropagation (FFBP) artificial neural network prediction model for the prediction of responses, namely, tensile strength, material consumption, build time and surface quality. Tensile specimens as per L 27 orthogonal array are printed considering the various combination of parameters. The printed samples have been subjected to tensile strength testing, surface roughness measurement, build time recording, and material consumption evaluation. The highest tensile strength of 57.633 MPa, lowest surface roughness of 1.71 μm, lowest build time of 0.35 h and lowest material consumption of 7.8 g are observed. The experimental results have been used to develop the artificial intelligence‐based prediction model through FFBP algorithm and sigmoid transfer function to predict the responses. The best performance of the developed neural network with R 2 for testing (0.99343), training (0.99366), and validation (0.99372) of data is recorded for prediction of responses with minimum percentage error. The study concluded that developed model is capable of predicting the responses of FDM process according to the input process parameters.