Nozzle Thermal Estimation for Fused Filament Fabricating 3D Printer Using Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

A preventive maintenance embedded for the fused deposition modeling (FDM) printing technique is proposed. A monitoring and control integrated system is developed to reduce the risk of having thermal degradation on the fabricated products and prevent printing failure; nozzle clogging. As for the monitoring program, the proposed temporal neural network with a two-stage sliding window strategy (TCN-TS-SW) is utilized to accurately provide the predicted thermal values of the nozzle tip. These estimated thermal values are utilized to be the stimulus of the control system that performs countermeasures to prevent the anomaly that is bound to happen. The performance of the proposed TCN-TS-SW is presented in three case studies. The first scenario is when the proposed system outperforms the other existing machine learning algorithms namely multi-look back LSTM, GRU, LSTM, and the generic TCN architecture in terms of obtaining the highest training accuracy and lowest training loss. TCN-TS-SW also outperformed the mentioned algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy measured by the performance metrics like RMSE, MAE, and R2 scores. In the second case, the effect of varying the window length and the changing length of the forecasting horizon. This experiment reveals the optimized parameters for the network to produce an accurate nozzle thermal estimation.