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Selection of the most suitable Rapid Prototyping (RP) and manufacturing process for a specific part creation is a difficult task due to the development of RP processes and materials. Most current RP processes can build with more than one type of material. The paper presents the evaluation on Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) part produced from Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) as a master pattern for Investment Casting (IC) process. The main purpose of this research is to evaluate the dimensional accuracy and surface roughness for hollow and solid part of FDM pattern for IC process with different layer thickness. The value were taken for both before and after the casting process. Results show that model fabricated with hollow internal pattern structure (ABS material) that produced by low layer thickness is better than other models in terms of its dimensional accuracy (-0.19666mm) and surface roughness (1.41μm). Even though the ABS built part performed better as the model, the PLA build part produces better overall casting result. Final part fabricated with solid pattern (PLA material) that produced by high layer thickness is better than other final parts which its dimensional accuracy (-0.12777mm) and surface roughness (3.07μm).

In addition to its application in media printing, inkjet printing is becoming an increasingly attractive option for the distribution and patterning of materials for a wide variety of applications. In this study a commercial inkjet printer was modified to study the resolution of fluid dot placement required to fabricate 3D multi-material patterns layer by layer. A Javabased computer program was developed to convert stereolithography (STL) data layer by layer, control ink cartridges individually and print ink with customized fluid dot placement arrangements. The study found that complement printing between nozzles which are 30 µm in diameter and 144 µm apart is essential to achieve a sufficiently dense 3D pattern. When printed with 36 µm vertical spacing a layer thickness of 1.30 µm is achievable, and when printing layer by layer, the thickness increases almost at a linear rate.