Surface roughness of the parts produced by Tomographic Volumetric Printing (TVP) process

Tomographic Volumetric Printing (TVP) presents a revolutionary approach to additive manufacturing, diverging from conventional layer-by-layer methods. This technique uses the principles derived from computed tomography (CT), utilizing three-dimensional volumetric data to simultaneously solidify the entire volume of the 3D object. The surface generation process in TVP calls for intricate control of the printing parameters based on the volumetric data. The printer interprets the three-dimensional information to selectively solidify or manipulate the material voxel by voxel at different locations within the volume. This dynamic process opens new possibilities for manufacturing highly complex and functional surfaces with varying textures, densities and functionalities. To find the capacity of the current state-of-the-art TVP process in terms of surface generation, we systematically examined the surface roughness of TV printed parts on various locations. The observations show that TVP can generate surfaces with sub-micrometer texture, thus significantly smoother than the surface produced by traditional layer-by-layer processing techniques. The analysis revealed a certain variability in the average roughness values across different faces and locations of the structure. The discussion in this presentation will revolve around the key findings from the surface analysis and how to minimize surface variations within the same part to improve the overall quality of TV printed samples.