Effect of Direct Slicing on Precision Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

An intelligent process planning for additive manufacturing (AM) is proposed in a paper presented at IFAC-IMS 20191. An important aspect of the intelligent process planning is to directly slice CAD models to generate paths for AM machines. In this paper an experimental approach is carried out to investigate the improvements in the results of fabrication using direct slicing approach. In the proposed process, a CAD model is directly sliced and layer contours are extracted from the ideal surface. The curvature based parametrization using a multi-step method is implemented for finding the position of layers. The dimensional errors are investigated first by comparing the errors generated during the tessellation process with the ideal surfaces. Then the results of printing using paths generated from STL files and the ideal surface defined in an IGES file are compared. The results show considerable improvements in surface continuity and dimensional accuracy of the parts fabricated form the direct slicing approach.