ENHANCING SURFACE QUALITY IN HYBRID FFF USING REAL-TIME MONITORING AND POINT CLOUD ANALYSIS

This study presents an active surface quality enhancement methodology for Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), leveraging a laser engraver module to address real-time surface quality issues. Typical FFF prints suffer from surface quality issues such as uneven surfaces, rough surfaces, and stringing. Traditional passive quality control methods, which mainly focus on adjusting process parameters for future print layers to mitigate anomalies, often fail to ensure consistent part quality and integrity. In contrast, the proposed active approach integrates auxiliary equipment to detect and rectify surface deviations during fabrication, improving overall process robustness. The developed system consists of a laser profilometer and a laser engraver module integrated into the FFF printer. The methodology employs a laser surface profilometer to acquire precise heightmap data, enabling the identification of surface imperfections such as the stair-step effect and material stringing. A 450nm wavelength, 5W laser engraver module is mounted on the printer’s extruder head to correct these anomalies actively. The experiments are optimized for operational parameters such as laser intensity, engraving speed, and hatching step size. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, quantitative metrics such as surface roughness and dimensional accuracy are calculated. Initial results indicate that the active methodology significantly enhances surface quality by lowering the surface roughness. This study highlights the potential of integrating active quality control mechanisms in FFF, to advance manufacturing precision and efficiency, offering a robust solution for addressing surface anomalies in additive manufacturing.