Date of Award

Fall 12-1-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

College of Technology

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing rapid reproductive systems are gaining popularity within the manufacturing industry. One of the many benefits of such systems has been the exploration of building practical sacrificial patterns for investment casted metals. Methods such as, Castform and Quickcast, has been developed for selective laser sintering and Stereolithography apparatus technologies respectively. Research has demonstrated significant cost savings when Additive manufacturing rapid reproductive systems are utilized for customized or small batch production of sacrificial patterns. The purpose of this study was to develop a methodology for evaluating quality characteristics of Fused Deposition Modeling. Since Fused Deposition Modeling have been demonstrated by a number of experimental studies as a viable alternative to wax sacrificial patterns, this study explored the effects of wall thickness and raster resolution on quality characteristics such as, diametric accuracy, cylindricity, and concentricity. The results of the study indicated raster resolution had no effect on the measured quality characteristics, however, the ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis tests showed statistical significance (α=0.05) for wall thickness of cylindricity of a small diameter (0.5”) and concentricity of two cylindrical features of diameters 0.5” and 1”. Moreover, the main contributions of this study involved the development of an accurate and robust design of experiment methodology. In addition, implications and recommendations for practice were also discussed.

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