Tratamento superficial de peças fabricadas por prototipagem rápida

Despite now being popular and affordable to small laboratories, companies and hobbyists, the surface quality of the parts produced through FDM Fused Deposition Modeling are not yet satisfactory for a wide range of purposes. Even tough new approaches on model slicing and processing are being employed, hand finishing of the parts is still necessary. Other post-processing methods are not practical and expensive. This work proposes and compare methods of chemical post processing of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene ABS printed parts with the use of dimethyl-ketone (acetone). Surface roughness was previously measured for several test artifacts that were then submitted to four different techniques of treatment for different periods. The techniques used were immersion in a acetone water solution; exposure to acetone vapor in a closed vessel, at 21°C, 50 °C and after the boiling point. The results are curves with the reduction of surface roughness with respect to post treatment duration for the different methods. The main finding is that this is a somewhat controllable process with predictable results and that produces reductions in surface roughness in the order of the 1000%.