Development of Automatic Smoothing Station Based on Solvent Vapour Attack for Low Cost 3D Printers

Abstract

Along the last years, 3d printing has been playing a new and important role in several market segments. As consequence, finishing methods have been developed and applied in order to improve surface roughness and mechanical strength. One of these methods is the solvent vapour attack. Nonetheless, this process is still manual and might lead to object deformation or structural damages. For that reason, the main goal of this work is to present a new approach that was implemented in automatic smoothing station. In this new approach, a close-looping control system identifies the vapour attack level in addition to controlling drying time and number of times that cycle is repeated. By the end, this proposal was identified to advances in 3d printing field, being a next step for domestic and distributed manufacturing.