Modares Mechanical Engineering

Modares Mechanical Engineering

Experimental and FEM Investigation of the Mechanical Strength of Parts Printed with a Five-Degree-of-Freedom 3D FDM Printer Based on a Parallel Mechanism

Document Type : Original Research

Authors
Farhad Khabbazi Barab
Mehran Mahboubkhah
Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
10.48311/mme.2025.27741
Abstract
In recent years, fused deposition modeling (FDM) has gained widespread use as one of the most advanced additive manufacturing methods due to its availability and ability to manufacture complex parts with relatively good strength.
One of the important research challenges in this field is to increase the strength of parts by appropriately selecting manufacturing variables and, in particular, choosing the arrangement of manufacturing layers by utilizing printing capabilities beyond three axes. In this paper, the aim is to print and investigate its parameters with 5-degree-of-freedom (5-Dof) robotic printers. For this purpose, a 5-Dof printer with a parallel mechanism and a delta robot was built and equipped, and Siemens NX software was used to generate five-axis G-code. To investigate the effect of the directions and arrangement of the filaments used on the quality of printing parts, especially with the five-axis printing method, a knee-shaped sample piece made of polylactic acid (PLA) was selected. Then, the necessary G-codes for printing this part with different methods and different orientations were created with common three-axis and five-axis software (Siemens NX) and printed by three-axis and five-axis printers. Experimental tensile and bending tests were performed on the printed samples and the superiority of about 11.5% and 7% of the five-axis printing method in tensile and bending force tolerance was observed compared to the three-axis method. To study the strength and finite element simulation of printed parts, ANSYS software was used and the results obtained from the analyses were compared with experimental results. The results of the experiments showed that the use of the five-axis printing method increases the tensile and bending strength of the printed part
Keywords
Parallel Mechanism
Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM)
5-Dof Printing
Finite Element Method
5-Axes G-Code

Subjects

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Modares Mechanical Engineering
Volume 25, Issue 8 - Serial Number 8
August 2025
Pages 543-553