Preliminary study of PLA wire colour effects on geometric characteristics of parts manufactured by FDM

Abstract

Colour can specially imply deviations in dimensional tolerances of manufactured parts, requiring the availability of the benchmark to ensure that Additive Manufacturing (AM) processed parts comply with the required design features, especially geometric ones. This is caused by the differences in the colouring process and the colour additives to the polymer. This work reports on the results of the geometrical deviations on samples development in 3D printed Poly-Lactic Acid (PLA) polymer with different pigmentations using Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). In parallel, a more detailed study has been carried out varying the work temperature in order to analyse the combined effect of both parameters subject to different temperatures and different AM paths in order to assess differences in the required AM conditions.