An experimental investigation of surface roughness in 3D-printed PLA items using design of experiments

Abstract

This work investigates the effect of 3D-printing parameters on surface roughness in polylactic acid printed material by adopting Taguchi's design of experiments approach. The control parameters under study were: number of shells, printing temperature, infill rate, and printing pattern. As the response, mean surface roughness (Ra) was selected. The control parameters were assigned to an L9 orthogonal array to organize the experiments and obtain the mean surface roughness results. It is concluded that printing temperature is the dominant parameter that affects surface roughness when it comes to 3D printing of polylactic acid material followed by printing pattern, infill rate, and the number of shells. © IMechE 2021.