Causes of Desktop FDM Fabrication Failures in an Open Studio Environment

Abstract

Abstract The usage phase often dominates the lifetime environmental impact of energy and material consuming products. Improper human behaviors could increase the environmental impacts during the use stage of the product’s life cycle. The use phase of desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers involves large energy and material consumption. In university makerspaces, many novices choose to use desktop FDM printers because of its easy operation, but novices often make improper design and operation decisions. The human errors increase the fabrication failures leading to higher material and energy consumption. Therefore, human behaviors should be investigated in order to identify the causes of fabrication failures in an open studio environment. Three types of failure causes are studied, which are designer error, operator error and machine error. In this research, computer-aided design (CAD) models, printing settings, user experience information and printing results were tracked and analyzed. In addition, the energy and material consumption were recorded from the printings. These data are analyzed to identify the key factors affecting printing failure rates and to improve the sustainability and efficiency of desktop FDM. From the collected data, a failure rate of 41.1% was observed. The failures caused by human error accounted for 26.3% of the total prints, which shows that human behaviors could influence the environmental impacts of FDM. For the factors impacting failure rates, user’s experience level and printing parameters were analyzed. We found that that experience did not result in higher expertise or lower failure rates.