evaluating@the@contributions@of@process parameters@in@sla@using@artificial@neural

network

J wN@sN@pL@ J sN@hN@lL@ JJ hN@sN@cL@@ JJJ mN@cN@l

* : Graduate students, KAIST, Korea; ** : Professor, KAIST, Korea; *** : Professor, NJIT, USA Department of Mechanical Engineering Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Tel: +82-042-869-3253; Fax: +82-42-869-3210; E-mail: hscho@lca.kaist.ac.kr Department of Mechanical Engineering New Jersey Institute of Technology Tel: +1-201-596-3335; Fax: +1-201-596-5601; E-mail: mleu@nsf.gov

Abstract: Though SLA(Stereolithography Apparatus) is being recognized as an innovative technology, it still can not be used to fully practical applications since it lacks of dimensional accuracy compared to conventional processes. In order to improve the accuracy of the SLA, this paper quantitatively evaluates how largely each process parameter of the SLA contributes to the part accuracy. For this pupose, a multi-layered perceptron is designed and trained by a set of sample patterns obtained via Taguchi's experiment planning, which estimates the dimensional errors of the test part, "letter-H" part from process parameters. Since the patterns are sparsely distributed, very careful design of the network is performed. Based upon the results obtained from the neural network estimator, a quality index of the part is evaluated, through which contribution of each process parameter is evaluated and discussed in detail. Keywords : Rapid prototyping, Stereolithography, Process analysis, Diagnostic part

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation RPD(rapid product development) is an emerging concept for global marketing and manufacturing, which can be constructed through effective organization of RPD network consisting of solid modeling, CAE, CA reverse engineering, CA measurement and inspection, rapid machining, rapid prototyping, and so on. RP(Rapid Prototyping) is such technology that produces prototype parts in much shorter time than traditional machining processes. This technology includes SLA(stereolithography apparatus), LOM(laminated object manufacturing), BPM(ballistic particle manufacturing), SLS(selective laser sintering), TDP(three dimensional printing), FDM(fused deposition manufacturing), among which SLA shows the best accuracy of the shapes of parts[1,2]. In spite of its potential usage to variety of areas, SLA

is being used only for a few applications since the accuracy of its products is still not high enough. Thus, many researchers have tried to improve SLA accuracy through various approaches.

1.2 Related works on SLA part accuracy On the improvement of SLA part accuracy, there have been several researches which can be classified into three categories as follows: 1) Accuracy improvement by resin development: Jacobs (Jacobs, 1993) and Schulthess et al. (Schulthess,+) reported that parts build from epoxy resin show higher accuracy than those from acrylate resin. 2) Accuracy improvement by H/W or S/W development: Developments of higher performance servo controller and laser scanning system aided SLA to make more accurate parts (Jacobs, 1995). Ullett et al. (Ullett, 1994) proposed a new hatching

scheme to reduce warpage in SLA. 3) Accuracy improvement by SLA parameter tuning: Pahati and Dickens (Pahati and Dikens, 1995) found that there exits an optimal layer thickness for given hatch spacing. Chartoff et al. (Chartoff et al.) reported that shrinkage and warpage can be reduced by selecting appropriate scanning speed of laser beam. In order to improve part accuracy of SLA, here an approach that analyzes the contributions of process parameters to part accuracy is proposed, which can be classified to be one of the third approach described in section 1.2. In order to evaluate the contributions of SLA parameters to part accuracy, a multi-layered perceptron is utilized, which models the relationships between the dimensional errors of a standard part and the SLA parameters. To minimize the required volume of training patterns, Taguchi's experiment planning technique is used. By the experiment planning, the network can be trained by only 18 sets of patterns, which is quite notable. By aid of the generalizing performance of the network, the contribution of each parameter is determined by using a quality index which is defined in this paper. Through the results of the analysis, layer thickness is found to be the major parameter that affects part accuracy more significantly than any other parameters.

Laser s o ru ce beam fo cu s in g le n s

m irro r (X -Y s ca n n e r)

e le va to r

p a rt b e in g b u ilt

s u p p o rt p la tfo rm

va t

liq u id p h o to p o lym e r

Fig. 1 A schematic drawing of SLA

2.2 Process parameters of SLA There are three kinds of parameters in SLA: part parameters, support parameters, and recoat parameters, among which part parameters are the most important ones that affect the accuracy of built parts in SL process. Thus, through the fine selection of part parameter, SLA can build parts more accurately, which is the point of this paper. Part parameters include layer thickness, hatch spacing, fill spacing, border overcure, hatch overcure, and fill cure depth. Layer thickness is the depth of a layer, which is such region that is solidified at the same elevation. Spacing is the distance between a couple of adjacent strands which is the narrow region solidified by the laser scanning as shown in Fig. 2. If the strand is located at the top or bottom surface of part, spacing is called fill spacing otherwise hatch spacing. Cure depth is the depth of strands. If the strand is located at the top or bottom surface of part, cure depth is called fill cure depth. Overcure is the depth that a strand pierces into the lower adjacent layer. If it is located at the lateral boundaries, overcure is called border overcure, otherwise hatch overcure. In this paper, fill cure depth(DF) is selected to be 0.004 larger than fill cure depth(UF) usually.
scanning mirror laser focusing lens line width solidified resin (strand) liquid resin layer 2 layer 1 spacing

2. STEREOLITHOGRAPHY
2.1 Working principle of SLA As shown in Fig. 1, SL process utilizes visible or ultraviolet(UV) laser and scanning mechanism to selectively solidify liquid photo-curable resin and form a layer whose cross-sectional shape is previously prepared from CAD data of the product to be produced. Through repeating the forming layers in a specified direction, desired 3-dimensional shape is constructed layer by layer. This process solidifies the resin to 95% of full solidification. After building, the built part is put into an UV oven to be cured up to 100%, i.e. post-curing process.

overcure

Fig. 2 Process parameters in SLA

3. PROCESS ANALYSIS USING

2.3 "Letter-H" part : a standard geometry Generally, in order to evaluate the accuracy of a 3dimensional shape, a lot of dimensional values representing the part geometry are needed. For example, when the user-part(Gargiulo and Ed, 1991) is under test, 170 dimensions should be measured and analyzed, and six dimensions for a letter-H part(Pang et al., 1995). This "letter-H" part is a much more simple part than the former one as shown in Fig. 3. "Letter-H" part indicates reliably the distortion and shrinkage characteristics of SLA with its simple shape and is easy to measure, whose five dimensions are used for characterizing its dimensional accuracy. Thus, the letter-H part is chosen as a standardized test part. Its shape and characteristic dimensions are presented in Fig. 3. The characteristic dimensions are denoted by H-top, B-top, Waist, Ankle, and Lateral, among which the Ankle is utilized to replace the Foot, presented in Fig. 3, because of its poor repeatability.
4.00 H-top 0.75 B-top Waist 0.75 Ankle Foot (not considered) 0.25 Lateral 0.25

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

3.1 Training the neural network using Taguchi's experiment planning For the relationship between process parameters and part dimensions, a neural network is to be constructed and trained by experimental data, which associates six categories of dimensional errors with the process parameters. The type of neural network to be used here is a multi-layered perceptron. As shown in the Fig. 4, the network inputs,  x = ( x , x , , x ) , are the process parameters and the network outputs, y = ( y , y ,, y ) , are the dimensional errors of the letter-H part described in sections 2.2 and 2.3. There are six process parameters to be tested and five part dimensions to be measured. These large numbers of process parameters and part dimensions lead us to the necessity of great numbers of experiments and measurements. For a series of full factorial experiments, i experiments and 5R i
i = i =

0.1

measurements should be performed, where i represents the number of levels of parameter i under test. If the numbers of levels, i , are set to be three equally for all parameters, it needs to perform 36 (= 729) experiments and 5R36 (= 3645). Therefore, it needs to reduce the number of experiments.

(unit : inch)

Fig. 3 CAD data(solid line) and built geometry(dotted line) of a letter-H part

Table 1 Employed orthogonal array: Trials layer thickness 0.004 0.008 0.012 0.004 0.008 0.012 0.004 0.008 0.012 0.004 0.008 0.012 0.004 0.008 0.012 0.004 0.008 0.012 border overcure 0.005 0.009 0.013 0.005 0.009 0.013 0.009 0.013 0.005 0.013 0.005 0.009 0.009 0.013 0.005 0.013 0.005 0.009 hatch overcure -0.004 -0.001 0.003 -0.001 0.003 -0.004 -0.004 -0.001 0.003 0.003 -0.004 -0.001 0.003 -0.004 -0.001 -0.001 0.003 -0.004 fill cure depth (UF) 0.003 0.007 0.011 0.007 0.011 0.003 0.011 0.003 0.007 0.007 0.011 0.003 0.003 0.007 0.011 0.011 0.003 0.007

L18

(unit : inch) fill cure depth (DF) 0.007 0.011 0.015 0.011 0.015 0.007 0.015 0.007 0.011 0.011 0.015 0.007 0.007 0.011 0.015 0.015 0.007 0.011 fill spacing hatch spacing 0.002 0.006 0.010 0.010 0.002 0.006 0.010 0.002 0.006 0.002 0.006 0.010 0.006 0.010 0.002 0.006 0.010 0.002

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

0.003 0.006 0.010 0.010 0.003 0.006 0.006 0.010 0.003 0.006 0.010 0.003 0.010 0.003 0.006 0.003 0.006 0.010

To set out an experiment plan reducing a number of experiments without the loss of physical characteristics of the process, Taguchi's experiment planning method(Roy, 1992) is adopted. Table 1 shows the orthogonal array and the parameter values applied to the experiments. This experiment plan reuires only 18 trials. According to the plan, each parameter is varied to three levels of values, from which the trend of second-order polynomials is extract. The neural network estimator is trained by using 18 sets of input/output patterns. The system architecture of the network is shown in Fig.4. This network architecture known as multi-layered perceptron (MLP) is one of the most widely known networks. To train this network, the back-propagation (Haykin, 1994) learning rule with a momentum term is used in updading the weights as follows:

that can be previously determined based upon the magnitudes of measurement error contained in training input patterns. Fig. 5 presents the network errors evaluated by Eq. 2 while learning in case when the number of the nodes n of the hidden layer is varied from 3 to 7. Fig. 5(a) denotes the case of = 0.3, = 0.3, which Fig.5(b) is that for = 0.1, = 0.3. The mean magnitude of noises contained in the training patterns are formed to be 5 m which can be converted to be normalized error 0.015. From the figures, it is easily seen that the network slightly underfits the training patterns in the case which n = 3 and overfits in the cases which n = , , . Thus, the optimal number of hidden nodes is selected to be 4, i.e n = .

ji ( n + 1) =
where

E ( n ) + ji ( n ) ji

(1)

1 process parameters x 2

y1 y2 y5

dimensional errors

E=


x6

ei


i =

(2)
input layer hidden layers output layer

e = y i y i,p ,

(3) Fig. 4 Neural network estimating the dimensional errors of built parts
1

S um of square (

j i is the synaptic weight of synapse i belonging to neuron j , ji ( n ) and ji ( n + 1 ) are the incremental weight changes at step n and n+1 respectively, is the learning rate, and is the i momentum rate. y is the estimated output of  pattern i and y i , p is the output pattern.

= 0.3 = 0.3

E)
0.1

Through the tests on the proper number of hidden nodes, a single hidden layer and four hidden nodes are adopted. In learning of neural network estimator, learning and momentum rate are selected as 0.1 and 0.3 respectively. The adopted sigmoid activation function is shown below:

0.01

n n n n n
0 10 000 20 000 30 000

= = = = =

3 4 5 6 7
40 000

0.00 1

N o. of epochs

(a)
1

S um of s quare(

+ exp[ ( net + )]

E)

f ( net ) =

= 0 .1 = 0 .3

(4)

0.1

where net j = w ji xi , xi is the inputs of neuron j i bias term. and is the constant In order to prevent both of overfitting and underfitting, the numbers of hidden layers and hidden nodes are carefully selected(Hush, 1993). Since the number of levels of each parameter is three, which is quite small, the number of hidden layers is fixed to one. And various numbers of hidden nodes are tried and checked to investigate if the energy represented as Eq. 2 converges to a specified value

0.01

n n n n

= = = =

3 4 5 6

n = 7
0 10000 20000 30000 40000

0.001

N o. of epoc hs

(b) Fig. 5 Convergences of the tested neural networks

3.2 Evaluating contributions of process parameters to the quality In order to evaluate the quality of a built part, it needs to define a quality index that indicates how accurately or errorneously the part was built. To this end, it is natural to define the quality index to be the sum of squares of the dimensional errors as follows:
J ( y) = y
 

the standard H-part with respect to layer thickness and hatch overcure which are proved to be most important. As can be seen from the Figs.7 (a) & (b), the dimensional errors of the H-top and waist tend to decrease for smaller values of the two parameters. On the other hand, the ankle error shows that there exists an optimal layer thickness for given range of the hatch overcure, which gives the minimal error value.
( 10 6 ) Contribution( ii )

= yi
i =

(5)

where y = ( y , , y ) is the dimensional errors of a part. Once the neural network estimation is trained, it can be considered as a function of process parameters ;
y = NNE ( x )
 

:22 822 622 422 2

(6)

Boder Overcure

Fill Cure Depth

Hatch Spacing

where the function NNE represents the relationship between the dimensional error and process parameters. Thus, the quality index can be rewritten as a composition as follows:
J ( y ) = J ( NNE ( ))
 

Layer Thickness

Hatch Overcure

Fill Spacing

Fig. 6 Contributions of the process parameters

(7)
H -to p e rro r
La ye rt h

The function representint the contribution of the ith parameter xi can be defined over a finite range [ ximin , ximax ] by

i =

j =

 , , x , , x  ) J ( NNE ( x i, j

ick

ne

ss

H a tc

rc h o ve

u re

(8)
 , , x  )) J ( NNE ( x , , x i, j
W aist error

(a)

H-top

In the above, the jth value of the xi , xij is defined by xi , j = ximin +



ximax ximin m

j , j = , , , m

(9)

La

ye r

t h ic

kn e

ss

H a tc

e h ov

rc u r

 , , x  ) are the nominal process and x = ( x parameters, which are recommended by resin suppliers and widely utilized by users, and m is the number of non-overlapping partitions [ xi , j , xi , j ] , whose union becomes the whole range of parameter i, [ ximin , ximax ] .

(b)

Waist

Though evaluating the Eq. 8, the contribution of each parameter can be determined. Fig. 6 presents the contributions of parameters which are evaluated by the above Eqs. 8 and 9. The figure shows that the most important parameter is the layer thickness and hatch overcure is the secondary. The rest of the parameters is found to be relatively less influential. Figs. 7 present the estimated dimensional errors of

Ankle error
Ha tc h

ove

rcu

re

Lay

ic e r th

kne

ss

(c) Ankle Fig. 7 Error estimations with respect to layer thickness and hatch overcure

4. CONCLUSION
In order to evaluate the contributions of SLA parameters to part accuracy, a multi-layered perceptron is trained, which associates the dimensional errors of "letter-H" part with the SLA process parameters. To minimize the required volume of training patterns, Taguchi's experiment planning technique is used. Since the patterns are sparcely distributed, very careful design of the network is performed, which is for avoiding overfitting and underfitting. For fitting the effects of six parameters, only 18 sets of patterns are needed, which is quite notable. By using the trained network, a quality index is evaluated over the whole domains of parameters. And the contributions defined as a variation of the quality index over the whole domains of parameters. Through the evaluation processes, layer thickness is proved to be the most important one and hatch overcure is the secondary. The dimensional errors of the H-top and Waist tend to decrease for smaller values of the two parameters. On the other hand, the Ankle error shows that there exists an optimal layer thickness for given range of the hatch overcure, which gives the minimal error value. The quality index is very important, while it is not sufficiently refined in this paper. Thus, it needs to work more on this, and for the fine tuning of SLA, it also needs more training patterns planned by higher level orthogonal array of Taguchi's method.

REFERENCES
Chartoff, R. P., L. Flach, and P. Weissman(1995), Material and process prameters that affect accuracy in Stereolithography, The sixth international conference on Rapid Prototyping Chen, C. C., and P. A. Sullivan(1995), Solving the mystery - The problem of Z-height inaccuracy of the Stereolithography parts, The Sixth International Conference on Rapid Prototyping. Gargiulo and Ed(1991), Proc. of the 1991 North American Stereographiy User Group Meeting, Orlando, Florida, March, 1991. Haykin, S.(1994), Neural networks, Macmillan. Hush, D. R. and B. G. Horne(1993), Progress in supervised neural networks, IEEE Signal Processing magazine, January . Jacobs, P. F. (1995), Stereolithography 1993: epoxy resins, improved accuracy and investment casting, Rapid Prototyping System fast track to product. Jacobs, P. F.(1995)., Stereolithography and other

RP&M technologies, ASME Press. Kim, J., S. N. Hong, and I. H. Paik(1996), A study on algorithm development of offset data generation in Stereolithography, Journal of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering , 13, 9, September. Leslie, H., E. Gargreb, and M. Keefe(1995), An experimental study of the parameters affecting curl in parts created using Stereolithography, The sixth international conference on Rapid Prototyping. Leu, M. C., D. H. Sebastian, and W. L. Yao(1996) Sreolithography rapid prototyping technology: characteristics, applications and R&D needs. Nguyen, H., J. Richter, and P. F. Jacobs(1992), Rapid prototyping and manufacturing: fundamentals of Stereolithography, SME, Dearborn, MI. Pahati, S., and P. M. Dickens(1995), Stereolithography process improvement, First National Conference on Rapid Prototyping and Tooling Research. Pang, T. H., M. D. Guertin, and H. D. Nguyen(1995), Accuracy of Stereolithograhpy parts : mechanism and modes of distortion for a Letter-H diagnostic part. Roy, R. K.(1990), A primer on the taguchi method, Van Nostrand Reinhold. Schulthess, A., M. Hunziker, and M. Hofmann, New resins for Stereolithography applycations, Rapid Prototyping Systems fast track to product. Ullett, J. S., R. R. Chartoff(1994.), Reducing warpage in Stereolithography through novel draw style., Solid Freeform Fabrication System. Yao, W. L., H. Wong, M. C. Leu, and D. H. Sebastian(1996.), An analytic study of investment casting with webbed epoxy patterns, ASME 1996 Winter Annual Conference and Rapid Response Manufacturing Symposium, Atlanta, GA, Nov.