Non‐destructive analysis (NDA) of external and internal structures in 3DP

Purpose – Three‐dimensional printing (3DP) is an increasingly popular additive manufacturing (AM) process. The structure produced in 3DP comprises of two main elements: an external “shell” and an inner “core”. The variation of this structure and print strategy dictates many factors, such as the final physical properties, the final weight of the part, the total material usage, effects on warpage and the build speed. As such, the accuracy and repeatability of these geometric structures is of importance. The measurement and validation of the actual printed structure is especially challenging due to the nature of the materials system. The purpose of this paper is to present an effective method to analyze the internal structure of a 3DP.Design/methodology/approach – A dedicated video‐monitoring system has been developed to capture and characterize the 3DP build structure layer‐by‐layer. A significant image‐processing phase involved image calibration, filtering, thresholding and segmentation. The investigation ...