Experimental Study of Air Nozzle Parameters for Air Suspension-based Additive Manufacturing

摘要

The past two decades has overseen the rapid growth in additive manufacturing. Instead of removing material from stock workpiece, an additive manufacturing machine builds a 3-D geometry by depositing materials in form of layers. Although additive manufacturing alleviates the accessibility constraints in manufacturability, its limited building direction, undesirable surface finish and constrained production environment significantly hinder the capability of making cost-effective functional parts. This paper presents a new concept of using air levitation in Additive Manufacturing with the intention of overcoming the process-imposed deposition and building directions. This paper focuses on the initial development of air suspension based additive manufacturing and seeks to minimize oscillation in the levitation. The research employs a Design-of-Experiment approach and intends to identify the optimal operation parameters of air nozzles such that the fluctuation of the levitated spherical particle is minimized.