Ceramic 3D printed sweeping surfaces

Abstract

Ceramic 3D printing has gained rapid development in recent years. Especially, desktop ceramic 3D printers get more and more popular for designers, artists, and makers to work with clays. As a highly viscous pseudoplastic liquid, the printing material clay produces featured aesthetics, and also indicates several manufacturing constraints. There are barely customized modeling tools for ceramic printing. Targeting for ceramic printing, we present a user-interactive modeling and fabricating framework using sweeping lines as the design tool. We integrate the ceramic printing constraints like self-supporting and collision-free in the modeling stage. Then we propose a customized method for generating the printing file, with the guarantee that the extruder traces a single continuous path without starts and stops. To fulfill this goal, we compute an adaptive zig-zag path along the sweeping surface. During the fabrication, our continuous path avoids the potential collision between the printing head and the physical model. Moreover, we optimize the extrusion amount along with the extruder movement, such that overlap between neighboring layers is appropriate in terms of both model stability and cost-effectiveness. We demonstrate the fabrication process and physical results to validate our method.