Investigation of the Influence of Geometric Factors on Surface Roughness in 3D Printing

One of the key requirements for any manufactured part is its surface roughness. For traditional (subtractive) technologies, ways to fulfil this requirement are well studied, but for 3D printing there are still gaps. This paper examines how parameters that describe the geometry of the material layer deposited during 3D printing relate to the resulting surface micro-profile. By calculating mutual correlations, we identify the parameters that have the strongest infl uence on the arithmetic mean deviation of the profile. We justify a set of layer-geometry parameters that can be used as process settings to achieve the desired arithmetic mean deviation of the profile.