Most of commonly used Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are developed based on a layered manufacturing process to fabricate 3D models. However, a critical drawback that reduces the surface quality of the AM parts is the stair case effect as a direct result of the layered deposition of the material. The final surface roughness of the products has been a key problem in AM. In this paper, a new approach to model surface roughness in Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is proposed. Based on actual observation and modeling of the cusp geometry under various setups and fabrication condition, an empirical model to express surface roughness distribution is presented. Considering the fact that the edge profiles crucially affect the surface quality, the developed model is used directly to estimate surface roughness of the final product. The proposed expression is verified by implementation and comparison with the experimental case data.
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