Effect of Acetone Vapor Smoothing Process on Surface Finish and Geometric Accuracy of Fused Deposition Modeling ABS Parts

FDM is a widely used additive manufacturing process, however, it has some limitations, such as surface finish, due to the staircase effect caused by the layer-by-layer deposition. Studies have been conducted on surface finish of ABS parts with the use of acetone, but the process parameters and the resulting effects have not been fully investigated in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of acetone vapor smoothing process on surface finish and geometric accuracy of fused deposition modeling ABS parts. Specimens with different geometries were created and printed using two directions in different scales. The parts were exposed to acetone vapor for 20, 30 and 40 minutes. 3D deviation maps, roughness and microscopic analyses were conducted. The staircase effect was reduced at the expense of some geometric deviations, which varied according to the exposure time and part orientation. The smoothing process applied to the flat surfaces proved to be quite effective in reducing roughness by 90%, however, this reduction led to an undesirable rounding of the sharp edges. The results obtained in this study are consistent with those found in the literature and may help improve the quality of the ABS printed parts.

Novel image restoration model coupling gradient fidelity term based on adaptive total variation

A novel image restoration model coupling with a gradient fidelity term based on adaptive total variation is proposed in this paper. In order to choose proper parameters, the selection criteria were analyzed theoretically, and a simple scheme to demonstrate its validity was adopted experimentally. To make fair comparisons of performances of three models, the same numerical algorithm was used to solve partial differential equations. Both the international standard test image on Lena and HR image of CBERS-02B of Dalian city were used to verify the performance of the model. Experimental results illustrate that the new model not only preserved the edge and important details but also alleviated the staircase effect effectively.

A New Gradient Fidelity Term for Avoiding Staircasing Effect

Image denoising with some second order nonlinear PDEs often leads to a staircasing effect, which may produce undesirable blocky image. In this paper, we present a new gradient fidelity term and couple it with these PDEs to solve the problem. At first, we smooth the normal vector fields （i.e., the gradient fields） of the noisy image by total variation （TV） minimization and make the gradient of desirable image close to the smoothed normals, which is the idea of our gradient fidelity term. Then, we introduce the Euler-Lagrange equation of the gradient fidelity term into nonlinear diffusion PDEs for noise and staircasing removal. To speed up the computation of the vectorial TV minimization, the dual approach proposed by Bresson and Chan is employed. Some numerical experiments demonstrate that our gradient fidelity term can help to avoid the staircasing effect effectively, while preserving sharp discontinuities in images.