On the Creation and Optical Microstructure Characterisation of Additively Manufactured Foam Structures (AMF)

Plastic-based additive manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly popular in the production of structural parts. Based on the idea of lightweight design and the aim of extending the functionality of additive structures, the production of additively manufactured foam structures has emerged as a new field of application. The optical characterisation of these structures is of particular importance for process adjustments and the identification of (unwanted) changes in the foam structure. The degree of foaming and the fineness of a foam structure are of interest at this point. In this context, only the part of a structure dominated by foam pores is considered a foam structure. So far, there are no sophisticated methods for such an optical characterisation. Therefore, in this work, microscope images of manufactured as well as artificially created additively manufactured foam structures were evaluated. On these images, the features porosity, pore size, pore amount and a measure for the textural change were determined in order to obtain information about changes within an additively manufactured foam structure. It is shown that additive structures show changing pore shapes depending on the orientation of the cutting plane, although there are no changes in the foaming behaviour. Therefore, caution is required when identifying changes within the foam structure. It was also found that, owing to the additive process, the total porosity is already set in the slicing process and remains constant even if the degree of foaming of individual tracks is changed. Therefore, the degree of foaming cannot be determined on the basis of the total porosity, but it can be assessed on the basis of the formation of large networks of process-related pores.