Effect of Printing Parameters on Compressive Strength of Additively Manufactured Porous Bone Scaffolds Using Taguchi Method

This paper presents Taguchi's design of experiment approach to optimize the process parameters of a 3D printer for enhancing the compressive strength (CS) of porous bone scaffolds. Effect of four process parameters, namely layer thickness (LT), build orientation (BO), build position (BP) on platform, and delay time (DT) on CS of calcium sulfate-based bone scaffolds, have been studied experimentally. L9 orthogonal array (OA) is chosen to design and perform the experiments. LT: 89 pm, BO: 0o, BP: Middle, and DT: 200 ms are the optimum values of parameters obtained by S/N ratio analysis. LT is most significant (48.18%), BO is slightly less significant than LT (45%), BP is little significant (6.39%), and DT is found non-significant (0.43%) as per the ANOVA analysis. A linear regression model is developed to predict the CS of fabricated scaffolds. The developed model is found adequate with 94.4% and 93%, R-sq and R-sq(adj) values, respectively. The confirmation test results in a maximum difference of 8.18% between experimental and predicted values of CS.

Automated summary

This study optimized the process parameters of a 3D printer using Taguchi's design of experiment approach to enhance the compressive strength of porous bone scaffolds. The most significant parameter was layer thickness, followed by build orientation, build position, and delay time. A linear regression model was developed to predict the compressive strength of the fabricated scaffolds, showing a high level of accuracy.