Shape Accuracy Evaluation of Geopolymer Specimens Made Using Particle-Bed 3D Printing (2020-07)¶

The primary benefit offered by the particle-bed 3D concrete printing process (3DCP) is the high flexibility in design for manufacture of concrete components with complex geometrical features. Accuracy evaluation has become a critical issue need to be overcome before a more widespread application of the particle-bed 3DCP technique in construction. This study reports an inexpensive image acquisition and processing technique using a flatbed scanner for shape accuracy evaluation of geopolymer specimens made using the particlebed 3DCP process. A set of image processing algorithms is developed to extract useful shape information from the scanned images without any human intervention. Centroid distance function is used as the shape error representation under the Polar coordinate system for the shape error measurement. A colorlabeled map in conjunction with the root mean square error are used for assessment of the shape accuracy. The results show that the developed method can satisfactorily be used for shape accuracy measurement of the particle-bed 3D printed specimen.