Exploring the multi-stage effects of material preparation and printing on 3D printing product quality

3D printing is a promising technique to fabricate flexibleparts and reduce the supply chain. Various materials, such asmetal powders, plastics, ultraviolet (UV) sensitive resins, can befabricated from 3D printing and form the final printed part.Currently, most researchers either focus on exploring printablematerials with good property or focus on the process qualitycontrol given a certain type of material. However, for many 3Dprinting processes, the printing process and product propertiesare dependent on both the material properties and processsettings. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the quantitativeanalysis of the interactions of material properties and printingprocess settings are rarely studied. In this paper, we treat thematerial preparation and 3D printing as different manufacturingstages, and we explore the multi-stage effects in 3D printing. Inparticular, we add carbon fiber to the CLEAR resin to alter thematerial properties for a stereolithography (SLA) 3D printingprocess. It is observed that the part properties are jointly affectedby material properties and printing process settings. Therefore,the material property and process settings should be jointlyconsidered for optimizing 3D printing processes.