Precision Uncertainty Due to Infill in Additive Manufacturing of Small-Scale Devices

Additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D printing, has become increasingly prevalent and is being widely employed as a fabrication approach across diverse sectors, including its applications in small-scale devices, where it offers advantages such as simplified fabrication processes, topologically optimized designed structures, multi-materials, customized anisotropic behaviors, and faster prototyping. Achieving high accuracy is of paramount importance in AM, as it ensures the precise fabrication of complex geometries and functional parts, especially in microscale and nanoscale devices, where even minor fabrication errors can significantly impact their performance and functionality. One of the sources of errors in additive manufacturing arises from the patterns used to fill the internal structure of the fabricated parts. This paper focuses on investigating the volumetric density percentage error in additive manufacturing processes, which quantifies the disparities between the nominal infill density and the actual infill density. The goal of this research is to optimize the parameters that affect this error, aiming to achieve the desired nominal infill density in AM parts.