Effect of Electroplating on Surface Roughness and Dimension of FDM parts at Various build orientations

Fused deposition modeling is used in industry, mainly for prototyping the designs modeled through CAD software. The most common build material used in this technology is ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) plastic and it is one of the common methods used to produce ABS parts of mid quantity series of high complexity objects. But due to stair step effect, the products produced by this method have high roughness compared to ABS parts produced by conventional method like injection molding process. So FDM parts are generally electroplated to meet the industry requirements. However, electroplating has a significant effect on the roughness and the dimension of the parts and this effect varies significantly at different part orientation. Therefore, in this work, experimentation is done to study the electroplating effect on FDM parts surface roughness and dimension at various surface angles. From the experimented data base of electroplated test parts, advanced interpolation method is used to predict the surface roughness and change in dimension of electroplated FDM parts at other orientation. Interpolation helps to find out the best build orientation for any significant features of a part to get good/required surface finish and gives dimension allowance required before elecfroplating. The proposed methodology is validated with a case study of prediction model using NACA 0012 airfoil.