Experimental investigation on abrasive flow finishing of FDM printed polymeric spur gear

Abstract

Recently the use of polymers has seen significant growth in manufacturing industries. Polymeric gear is applied in
automation, material handling systems, toys and some household applications. At the same time, there are numerous benefits of additive manufacturing techniques. Three dimensional (3D) printed products and components have a wide range of applications, which are growing day by day. The outer surface of the 3D printing process suffers from poor finishing due to layer addition. In this study, abrasive flow machining (AFM) is utilised to assess how well polymeric gears created using fused deposition modelling are finished (FDM). In this study, abrasive flow machining (AFM) is utilised to assess how well polymeric gears created using fused deposition modelling are finished (FDM). The study develops an AFM medium from coal-ash powder, EDM oil, and glycerin. AFM medium viscosity and process parameters have been improved to improve surface quality. Using the statistical program Minitab, a Taguchi L9 Design of Experiments (DOE) has been generated to optimize parameters and establish a functional relationship between the output parameter, surface roughness, and the input variables, which included layer thickness, abrasive concentration, mesh size of abrasive, and finishing time. An analysis has been carried out to optimize the parameters of the abrasive flow machining (AFM) medium in order to improve the surface quality of polymeric gears that are created using fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology. The ideal parameters have been determined to be 33% abrasive concentration, 220 abrasive mesh size, 60% liquid synthesizer, 0.46 Pa/sec media
viscosity, 0.1 layer thickness, and 90 minutes completion time. An improvement of 95.37%, from 10.80 μm to 0.50 μm, in the surface imperfection of FDM-printed polymeric gears has been achieved through the efficient optimization of the AFM medium and process parameters. Surface quality of FDM-printed polymeric gears can be enhanced using AFM as a post-processing approach.