Manufacturing & Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-18-2026
Abstract
This paper presents the design, fabrication, and thermal characterization of an acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) mold produced by fused deposition modeling (FDM) extrusion-based additive manufacturing used for the wax casting of a drone landing leg. A thermal monitoring framework, consisting of four K-type thermocouples logged at 1 s intervals, was deployed across six casting trials to capture the complete solidification cycle, yielding 84,717 time-stamped measurements. The study focuses on thermal data analysis and materials science interpretation through descriptive statistics, normality diagnostics, inter-trial Kruskal–Wallis tests, phase-duration analysis, rolling-variance monitoring, and inter-channel Pearson correlation. Key findings include a persistent spatial temperature hierarchy among the four sensor channels (CH2 > CH1 > CH4 > CH3) with temperature differences of 6–8 ∘C across all trials, a propagation delay of up to 3.2 min between the first-contact and thermally inertial sensor locations, non-Gaussian right-skewed temperature distributions in every channel (consistent with Newtonian cooling), and statistically significant inter-trial variability (HCH3=3,190, p< 0.0001), driven primarily by pour temperature differences. The rolling 60 s standard deviation is identified as the most effective real-time indicator for monitoring the solidification process in this geometry. The results are discussed in the context of soy wax solidification physics, the thermal resistance of the ABS mold, and their implications for future aluminum casting applications.
Recommended Citation
Cem Altıparmak, Sadettin, Maher Zayed, Samuel Hawk, Mohamed Baddi, Jesus Degollado, Ahmed Bendaouia, and Jianzhi Li. "Thermal monitoring of solidification in molded casting of drone landing leg." The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (2026): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-026-19162-7
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology
DOI
10.1007/s00170-026-19162-7
Comments
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.