Studying the Effect of Short Carbon Fiber on Fused Filament Fabrication Parts Roughness via Machine Learning

Abstract

Along with the characteristic staircase effect, short carbon fibers, added to reinforce Fused Filament Fabrication parts, can significantly worsen the resulting surface finishing. Concerning this topic, the present work intends to improve the existing knowledge by analysing 2400 measurements of arithmetic mean roughness Ra corresponding to different combinations of six process parameters: the content by weight of short carbon fibers in PETG filaments f, layer height h, surface build angle th, number of walls w, printing speed s, and extruder diameter d. The collected measurements were represented by dispersion and main effect plots. These representations indicate that the most critical parameters are th, f, and h. Besides, up to a carbon fiber content of 12%, roughness is mainly affected by the staircase effect. Hence, it would be likely to obtain reinforced parts with similar roughness to unreinforced ones. Different machine learning methods were also tested to extract more information. The prediction model of Ra using the Random Forest algorithm showed a correlation coefficient equal to 0.94 and a mean absolute error equal to 2.026 μm. On the other hand, the J48 algorithm identified a combination of parameters (h = 0.1 mm, d = 0.6 mm, and s = 30 mm/s) that, independently of the build angle, provides a Ra < 25 µm when using a 20% carbon fiber PETG filament. An example part was printed and measured to check the models. As a result, the J48 algorithm correctly classified surfaces with low roughness (Ra < 25 μm), and the Random Forest algorithm predicted the Ra value with an average relative error of less than 8 %.