IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF PLASTIC PARTS OBTAINED BY 3D PRINTING

In the present paper authors propose an approach for obtaining a better roughness in terms of plastic parts resulted from 3D printing process. The main objective involves obtaining a surface roughness of the plastic parts through combining additive manufacturing technology and conventional technology, milling. In order to validate the settle aim there was established three dials on the top of the plastic printed part, test sample, which has been machined with two different cutting tools with different diameters. Also the machining process of the three areas was performed using two different toolpaths generation parameters. The machining process was performed on a vertical milling center, Challenger 2418. After performing the establish steps was performed a roughining measurement of the initial test sample surface as well as those resulted from the milling. This step was employed using a complete roughness measuring instrument, TR-220, which allows obtaining 19 different roughness parameters.