Despite the broad approbation of additive manufacturing technologies over diverse industries, printed parts’ performance, quality, and related build time are still greatly influenced by printing parameters. These parameters majorly affect mechanical strength, surface finish, dimensional accuracy, and overall production time of the printed part. Customized 3D printing layer thickness, speed, and acceleration are crucial parameters that affect the speedy printing process and final product quality. The current work considers layer thickness in addition to speed and high acceleration values effect on the surface quality, surface roughness and productivity time of 3D printed Polylactic Acid (PLA). The experimental methodology implemented within this work involves the use of three levels of parameters (50,125,200) mm/sec for speed, (1000,3000,5000) mm/sec2 for acceleration, and (0.12,0.2,0.28) mm for layer thickness. Response surface methodology (RSM) was applied as a statistical approach to design the proposed experiments and optimize the effect of the considered process parameters. A second-order polynomial model was proposed to predict the surface roughness in both x & y directions as well as production time for the 3D printed samples. The results showed that while speed and high acceleration values can significantly reduce printer production time, they significantly negatively influence surface roughness. Specifically, notable layer thickness and speed variations directly impacted the PLA sample’s surface roughness. The results also showed that using high acceleration values will impact surface quality. Still, it increases the production rate (it can reduce printing time by 14–45%) by enabling the printer to reach the desired speed in the shortest time.
