Investigations for improving the surface finish of FDM based ABS replicas by chemical vapor smoothing process: a case study

Purpose - This research work aims to make an effort to investigate the effect of fused deposition modelling (FDM) process parameters on the surface finish of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) replicas (as pre-processing stage), followed by chemical vapor smoothing (CVS) process (as a post-processing stage) as a case study. Design/methodology/approach - The Taguchi L18 orthogonal array has been used for optimizing process parameters of FDM and CVS processes. Findings - This study highlights that orientation and part density, and the interaction between these two have a significant effect on the surface finish at the pre-processing stage of FDM. However, after post-processing with CVS, there is hardly any influence of pre-processing FDM parameters. Originality/value - The study highlights that for improving the productivity of the FDM process, the parametric optimization of process may be made on the basis of production cost and time in place of surface finish of ABS replicas. The results obtained have been verified by performing the confirmation experiments.