A statistics-guided approach to dimensional quality characterization of free-form surfaces with an application to 3D printing

Free-from surfaces such as three-dimensional (3D) printing products play an important role in customized production of manufacturing. Despite its popularity, 3D printing products often suffer dimensional quality issues due to geometric deformation during the layer-by-layer printing process. Different from traditional production, 3D printing products are often customized and not for mass production, thus it is often difficult to designate tolerance profiles to assess the production quality. To address this challenge, we propose a statistics-guided approach to characterize the dimensional quality for free-form surfaces. The proposed approach can provide local quality measures based on the original customized design and the scanned profile of a printed product. It gives a unified scale of the quality assessment measurements to conveniently compare the quality of products from different customized designs. Case studies and simulation experiments show that, the proposed approach can provide effective quality assessment and characterization for 3D printing.