Effect of printing speed and layer height on geometrical accuracy of FDM-printed resolution holes of PETG artifacts

Poly Ethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG) is a thermoplastic polyester with excellent formability, durability and chemical resistivity. Thus, it is an ideal choice for a wide range of applications, such as food and drink containers (cooking oil containers, bottles, FDA-compliant food storage containers), cosmetics packaging and medical and pharmaceutical applications (implants, packaging of pharmaceutical and medical devices). Furthermore, PETG-filament prints easily and gives excellent layer adhesion, thus it is widely used in Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). However, in order to achieve high levels of process repeatability, it is essential to correlate process parameters with the mechanical properties and the geometrical accuracy of the final PETG product. In literature, there is a wide variety of studies that examine the mechanical properties of 3D-printed parts. On the other hand, studies of geometrical accuracy of FDM-processed parts are limited, according to authors’ best knowledge. In the current study, 5-hole PETG features are created by a low-budget FDM printer, according to the ISO ASTM 52902-2021 standard. The holes are of diameters of 4mm, 3mm, 2mm, 1mm and 0.5mm. The artifacts are built with three different printing speeds (20mm/s, 50mm/s and 80mm/s) and with three different layer heights (0.1mm, 0.2mm, 0.3mm). The measurements on these artifacts are the diameters of the holes, which are obtained with a microscope. The results are then analyzed statistically and commented.