Optimization and cleaning support structures in additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing is a method that is produced by melting the material layer by layer, laying it according to the geometry of the part, and combining it by cooling, and it is a method that has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Due to the fact that the material is laid by melting, it is necessary to use support structures in order to prevent the molten material from deteriorating and sagging, depending on the geometry of the part to be produced. Support structures are an important structure for the production of complex parts. However, support structures are structures that need to be cleaned after production in order to obtain the designed part. Since it is cleaned and discarded after production, it is defined as production residue and increases both production cost and production time. For this reason, studies on the optimization of support structures have been observed recently. In this study, productions were made using tree, standard tree, concentric, gyroid, line and standard support structures and standard support structures designed using the EBM method on a complex frog model. After these different productions, examinations were made on the surface quality and geometric accuracy. On the cleaning of support structures, milling, wire brush, grinding and micro motor milling and cleaning methods in different geometries produced by SLE method were compared. After the cleaning process, the surface quality and geometric accuracy of the parts were examined. As a result of the studies, it has been determined that among the different support structures used, line support structures provide a 20% reduction in the amount of material used compared to standard support structures, and save up to 17% in production time. It has been observed that line support structures are advantageous in terms of production time and time, but standard tree support structures give more positive results in terms of traces left on the surface after cleaning. When the cleaning methods are compared, it is seen that milling is the most advantageous method in terms of both roughness and geometric accuracy in flat surface parts, but manual cleaning with micro motor milling instead of milling on free-form surfaces produces more efficient results.