A Multi-Material Virtual Prototyping System for Product Development and Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

AbstractThis paper proposes a multi-material virtual prototyping (MMVP) system that integrates the virtual reality (VR) and the layered manufacturing (LM) technologies for digital fabrication of heterogeneous multi-material prototypes for advanced product development and biomedical engineering. The system consists mainly of two algorithms for sequential and concurrent multitoolpath planning, and a virtual prototyping system. The algorithms adopt a topological hierarchysorting algorithm to establish the hierarchy relationship of multi-material slice contours for facilitating toolpath planning of multi-material layered manufacturing (MMLM). Subsequently, the sequential multi-toolpath planning algorithm generates sequential toolpaths that avoid redundant tool movements. To reduce build time further, the concurrent multi-toolpath planning algorithm generates collision-free concurrent toolpaths. Based on the hierarchy information, a bounding box can be adopted to approximate envelopes of contour families of th...