Prediction surface roughness of 3D printed parts using genetic algorithm optimized hybrid learning model

The final product of additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing critically depends on the surface quality. An experimental study on the 3D printed intake manifold flange using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) material was executed by varying the four process parameters. A fused deposition modeling (FDM) based 3D printer was used to fabricate the flanges. The association between the parameters and the surface roughness of printed ABS flanges was investigated. A feed forward neural network (FFNN) model trained on particle swarm optimization (PSO) optimized with a genetic algorithm (GA) was used to estimate the surface roughness. A Box-Behnken design (BBD) with printing parameters at three levels was used, and 25 parts were fabricated. The suggested model demonstrated a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9865 on test values, mean of root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 0.1231 after 500 times training for generalization. And also mean of overfitting factor is 0.7110. This means that the suggested system could generalize. Comparing the results from the suggested model and ANN, the suggested hybrid model outperformed ANN in predicting the surface roughness values with no overfitting. This suggests that GA optimized PSO based FFNN may be a more suitable method for estimating product quality in terms of surface roughness.