Understanding How Your 3D Printer’s Hardware & Software Components Contribute to its Performance - Markforged
Precision and Accuracy is the last in our series to understand how your 3D Printer’s hardware & software components contribute to its performance. First, we covered Layer Height, then Minimum Feature Size.
Precision and Accuracy
Now, let’s review accuracy, or how similar your 3D printed part’s measurements are to those in the CAD file. The easiest way to check accuracy is to simply model and print a cube. For this exercise, a 20 mm3 cube was printed in both 0.1 mm and 0.2 mm layer heights. With 5 of each, there were 10 total cubes to measure.
For the Mark Two, Y and Z show the best accuracy. The X-axis is very long (more than twice as big as Y), so it is relatively not as accurate, but still shows a deviation of no more than 0.25 mm from nominal, an impressive feat. Also, as we saw earlier, Z-axis has the finest resolution, so intuitively, it measures consistently the closest to nominal. There was no identifiable trend in accuracy between 0.1 mm and 0.2 mm layer heights. However, if we had chosen a Z-axis dimension that was not evenly divisible by either 0.1 mm or 0.2 mm, we might expect closer accuracy with 0.1 mm layer heights.
A secondary, but equally important point on resolution – you can also control resolution when you generate the STL file. Simply stated, STL files consist of a set of triangles that together make up a mesh. Just like the terrace example, you can adjust settings to subdivide the triangular steps to produce finer and more gradual surfaces, which is especially important for curves. See the example below – the part on the left has a higher resolution with far more triangular subdivisions than the part on the right.
