Processing Parameter Setting Procedure for a Commercial Bowden Tube FDM Printer

Additive manufacturing (AM), especially fused deposition modeling (FDM), has experienced great development and diffusion during recent years. However, it still faces some limitations, such as poor dimensional accuracy or surface defects, the improvement of which motivates the elaboration of the present work. Contrary to an approach based on the optimization of parameters to obtain a single invariant value, the main objective of this study is the design of a procedure that anyone can follow to generate a printing profile for their specific FDM printer, environment, and imposed constraints through the adjustment of some selected parameters in the popular slicing software UltiMaker Cura. The resulting procedure consists of four ad hoc designed specimens and their analysis algorithms, all connected by a general workflow that ensures the correct execution of the procedure. Its applicability and effectiveness have been proved in a case study where a printing profile was developed for the real manufacturing project of a custom 3D object in polylactic acid (PLA), obtaining an improvement of 50% in tolerances and proving that the proposed parameter setting procedure represents a reduction in the setting time and material consumption versus conventional trial and error methodologies.