Surface roughness for dispensing patterns in nozzle dispensing solid freeform technology

Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) is the name given to family of manufacturing processes which allow three-dimensional fabrication, directly from CAD data. Recently, researches on expanding SFF technology into direct product manufacturing are focused. However, conventional SFF technologies have disadvantage that its equipment is usually expensive and materials are limited. Thus, researchers have focused on the development of SFF technology that more economic and simple. One of them is direct writing system. It can use a variety of materials and be applied to various fields. Furthermore, the configuration of the equipment is simple and inexpensive compared to other SFF technologies. Generally, in order to fabricate a three-dimensional structure, multiple thin layers should be stacked. Thus, the surface roughness of a layer is critical. And it depends on writing patterns. In this paper, the surface roughness according to dispensing patterns in the direct writing system was studied.