IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/uiiexx/v51y2019i2p153-167.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Online droplet monitoring in inkjet 3D printing using catadioptric stereo system

Author

Listed:
  • Tianjiao Wang
  • Chi Zhou
  • Wenyao Xu

Abstract

Inkjet 3D printing is becoming one of the most disruptive additive manufacturing technologies, due to its unique capability of precisely depositing micro-droplets of multi-functional materials. It has found widespread industrial applications in aerospace, energy and health areas by processing multi-functional metal-materials, nano-materials, and bio-materials. However, the current inkjet 3D printing system still suffers from a low production quality issue, due to low process reliability caused by the complex and dynamic droplet dispensing behavior. Due to the challenges in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and versatility, robust droplet monitoring and process inspection tools are still largely unavailable. To this end, a novel catadioptric stereo system is proposed for online droplet monitoring in an inkjet 3D printing process. In this system, a regular industrial CCD camera is coupled with a flat mirror and magnification lens system to capture the tiny droplet images to detect the droplet location in 3D space. A mathematical model is formulated to calculate the droplet location in 3D world space from 2D image space. A holistic hardware and software framework is constructed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of resolution, accuracy, efficiency, and versatility, both theoretically and experimentally. The results show that the proposed catadioptric stereo system can achieve single micron resolution and accuracy, which is one-order-of-magnitude higher than the 3D printing system itself. The proposed droplet location detection algorithm has low time complexity, and the detection efficiency can meet the online monitoring requirement. Multi-facet features including the droplet location and speed can be effectively detected by the presented technique. The proposed catadioptric stereo system is a promising online droplet monitoring tool and has tremendous potential to enable trustworthy quality assurance in inkjet 3D printing.

Suggested Citation

  • Tianjiao Wang & Chi Zhou & Wenyao Xu, 2019. "Online droplet monitoring in inkjet 3D printing using catadioptric stereo system," IISE Transactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 51(2), pages 153-167, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:51:y:2019:i:2:p:153-167
    DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2018.1532133
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24725854.2018.1532133
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/24725854.2018.1532133?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:51:y:2019:i:2:p:153-167. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/uiie .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.