Chemical treatments to enhance surface quality of FFF manufactured parts: a systematic review

Additive manufacturing is an innovative technology with clear differentiation from traditional material forming or removal technologies. A great challenge that is still present when deciding on its use is final surface quality, which varies considerably between methods within this technology as well as between machines, manufacturing parameters, etc. A fairly common post-manufacturing process when using the Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) method is a chemical treatment, which offers a substantial surface improvement in terms of roughness and visual appearance. An exhaustive systematic study has been carried out on the chemical post-processing methods currently used to reduce surface roughness of polymeric parts manufactured by means of FFF.