A Comparative Study of Cartesian and Delta 3D Printers on Producing PLA Parts

The additive manufacturing processes emerged at the end of the last century and became popular by low-cost 3D printers. The most used printers work on a cartesian configuration, but recently were launched delta machines. These 3D printers use a more complex control system due to their trajectories generation but may present some advantages over the cartesian configuration. To increase the knowledge about additive manufacturing, a comparative study with cartesian and delta printers was performed to evaluate the performance on printing a testing part. Three samples were produced in each printer and compared based on surface quality, manufacturing time, mass and dimensional measurement. The printed objects were 3D scanned for comparing the digitized geometry by aligning the point cloud generated to its virtual 3D model. The parts produced in delta printer obtained better surface quality, while cartesian printer provided better dimensional accuracy. The results also showed that the variation of the mass and time to produce the parts were not significant.