Design and Development of Cartesian Co-Ordinate Based 3D Printer

Now a day, manufacturing of complex parts have become a major role in industries. By the use of subtractive processes, there is a lot of scrap and also the accuracy of parts is not up to the mark. So, to eliminate these problems Additive Manufacturing is used, which converts 3D CAD models into physical objects. 3D printer can produce parts layer by layer with the addition of the raw materials used by executing the NC-codes of a CAD designed model, which is controlled by a computer. In this project work, Design and development of Cartesian co-ordinate based 3D printer is done for the manufacturing of sample parts by using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process. The Fused Deposition Modeling is an advanced manufacturing process uses the thermoplastics, ABS, Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA), polycarbonate (PC), PLA (Poly Lactic Acid) and ULTEM 9085. PLA (Poly Lactic Acid) is used as the filament in this project for 3D printing of Mechanical parts and also the above mentioned raw filaments can be used. The parts are modeled in the CATIA V5 R20 software, and it is converted into STL (Stereo lithography) file. By using CURA software, the STL file is converted into G-codes and then it is sent to PRONTERFACE software, which is the interface software between the computer and the Cartesian coordinate based 3D printer. The PRONTERFACE software sends the instructions (i.e. G-codes) to the Cartesian coordinate based 3D printer and the required physical parts can be printed.