Design And Research Of A Multiple Output 3D Printing Parallel Manipulator

New manufacturing technology has broken the limit of traditional ones, as the advent of the intelligent manufacturing era (Industry 4.0). The 3D printing technology, a kind of additive manufacturing technology which is different from casting and milling, has changed people’s perception of the manufacturing industry. Since 3D printing not only can fabricate as the traditional manufacturing technology does, but also has unique advantages in making products with complex internal structure or high external surface accuracy, it has become increasingly high-profile as new technology of be manufacturing in recent years. With the constantly updating of 3D printing equipment, materials and techniques, the 3D printing speed and precision are continuously improved and the more competitive and innovative of 3D printing industry are increased also.The purpose of this study is to design a new type of 3D printing equipment combined with parallel mechanism, which is based on fused deposition modeling (FDM). The 3D printing equipment adopted FDM is suitable for office environment, non-pollution, low price and easy to make. According to the research and analysis of the existing 3D printer, most of those are based on FDM technology can only make one product at a time in present, and what’s more, the majority are series mechanism, whereas they have disadvantages. Consequently, a multiple output 3D printing parallel manipulator is proposed which can manufacture two of more same products at a time and can improve surface quality and mechanical properties in a certain extent simultaneously.We proposed two different types of multiple output 3D printing manipulators:(1) A multiple output 3D printer with redundant parallel manipulator. We adapted the Delta parallel mechanism as the main configuration and arranged two or more nozzles on the moving platform, all of the nozzles had the same movement can print more same products at a time. We employed the Stewart parallel mechanism as auxiliary configuration, which serves as redundant actuation to improving precision and stability of the moving platform. (2) A multiple output 3D printer with decoupling parallel manipulator. The proposed new type of decoupling parallel mechanism has four degrees of freedom, three translational degrees and one rotational degree (3T1R). The same branched chains of the 3D printer are sharing drive, so that we used one driving system to actuate more than one moving platform doing the same movement to achieve the purpose of multiple outputs. Moreover, we fabricated a prototype 3D printer and conducted 3D printing experiments on the foundation of the design model.This paper mainly focused on the theoretical analysis of these two types of parallel manipulator, such as degrees of freedom, forward and inverse kinematics, workspace, dexterity, static stiffness. In addition, we had a briefly introduction on the design and manufacture, assembly debugging and experiments analysis of the multiple output decoupling 3D printing manipulator.