Surface Quality Analysis and Geometric Analysis with Image Processing Technique of Evolvent Profiled Cylindrical Gear Wheels Produced by FDM Method

3D printers offer important opportunities to solve problems encountered in production processes. This study focused on the surface quality and dimensional control of the ABS based gear wheels produced in 3D printer by Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) method. For this purpose, the gear samples using three different layer thicknesses (90, 190 ve 290μm) were prepared at a constant temperature with the 3D printer. The dimensional control of the test specimens was performed by using morphological image processing methods and the surface quality was evaluated by means of average surface roughness measurements. Photographs of the products were taken from a black background with a camera-microscope system. The gray images obtained by converting the color images to gray were applied threshold (T=60). Thus, 2-bit images were obtained in which the products remained white and the background was black. Erosion and subtraction were applied to these images respectively to obtain the contours of the gear wheels. The boundaries obtained from the drawing program and the boundaries obtained from the manufactuted gear wheel visuals were overlaid and the deviations between them were calculated. As a result, best performance in terms of dimensional control and surface quality was obtained in ABS based samples produced using the lowest layer thickness. However, it is understood that it can be preferred to produce with 290 micron precision when compared with resource consumption