Capabilities of the Additive Manufacturing in Rapid Prototyping of the Grippers’ Precision Jaws

Abstract

Nowadays, additive manufacturing is becoming increasingly popular, cheap and easily accessible. It got particularly useful in industry. While the engineering designs need to be verified as quickly as it is possible, it is hardly unmanageable due to their high costs and a long time of production. 3-D printing enables a totally different approach towards these problems. This technique lets the mechanic apply the changes in a design on spot and test it under the real conditions. Even though it gives the crucial advantage of the price and the save of time, it brings some major problems as well. The 3-D printers offer the accuracy and precision limited to much lower standards than traditional machining. Moreover, the filaments used for the additive manufacturing have usually much worse material parameters than the most common metals. This study assesses the capabilities of the additive manufacturing in the production of the small elements for the tests. It is based on the real-life case of rapid prototyping of the grippers’ precision jaws used for assembling the cylindrical objects in the casings. The paper contains an overview of grippers, 3-D printers and filaments, finite element strength tests and the summary of the method’s potential. Its result is a method of creating models and testing fragile elements so to guarantee their coherence and to verify their applicability for the particular intent.