Date of Award

2020

Degree Type

Capstone Project

Abstract

This report contains a comprehensive overview of the Team 09: 5-Axis 3D Printer Honors Capstone project. This project was presented by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) of Newport, Rhode Island. Jim Leblanc from NUWC originally defined the problem as the design, building, and demonstration of a 3D printer with 5 degrees of freedom that can print complex geometry with reduced material support. Typical 3D printers use 3 axes of motion to position an extruder to print parts layer by layer. The limitations of traditional 3-axis 3D printers is that parts with overhangs require support material and parts can only be printed by consecutive stacked layers in one direction. A 5-axis 3D printer would allow the extruder to position itself at various angles relative to the part which would eliminate the need for support material and would allow the extruder to print layers orthogonal to existing print layers. This ability to print layers orthogonally would bring great bene ts to additive manufacturing as it would allow prints to have optimal strength in any desired direction.

By May 2020, Team 09's objective is to present NUWC with a working prototype 5-Axis 3D Printer and demonstrate its ability to print a part using all 5 degrees of freedom. Significant progress has been made towards accomplishing this objective. A literature and patent search was completed by each member of Team 09, design approaches were compared, and significant design work has been completed. Literature and patent searches provided insight into existing approaches to the concept of a 5-Axis 3D printer and/or components that would be useful for its design. Several design approaches for the software, hardware, and electrical components were compared and a proof of concept was designed to meet the design specifications. In the process of designing this proof of concept, a 2-Axis drawing machine was created and tested, a CAD assembly of the physical hardware was generated, a 3-axis 3D printer was purchased and measured for modification, and a 5-axis g-code parsing and slicing software was created and demonstrated. The current status of this project is such that the entire 5-axis printer has been designed and built. While it has not yet been tested to print 5-axis parts, many of its critical subsystems have been tested and proven to work.

Comments

Sponsor: Naval Undersea Warfare Center

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