Benchmarking of additive manufacturing systems with photopolymers through part quality analysis

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has attained a widespread popularity as machines and equipment necessary for fabrication have become more accessible. These manufacturing processes, however, have each their own limitations and capabilities. For instance, every machine to its own process will be able to fabricate a similar product, with different errors and accuracies. As a result, it is important that machine capabilities are known prior to utilization, so that the automated operations of the additive manufacturing (AM) system are capable of producing a part with the desired dimensions and geometries. In this study, a benchmarking analysis is conducted among three different AM systems for processes involving photopolymers. Accuracy is evaluated in terms of ISO IT grades and standards of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, in order to compare machines that produced the same reference artifact in stereolithography (SLA), digital light processing (DLP) and PolyJet.