Encapsulated Transmission of Part Specifications for Distributed Solid Freeform Fabrication

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes an approach to the transmission of part specifications for distributed solid freeform fabrication. We consider an approach motivated by recent advances in software development associated with object oriented programming style and data encapsulation. Rather than insisting on translation of part specifications to a standard format, we specify a set of public methods necessary for solid freeform fabrication (SFF) or layered manufacturing (LM). By specifying public members and methods that provide fabrication systems with all the information needed to build parts, SFF systems can build parts based on models constructed in any modeling environment for which the methods are available. As an example, we consider a candidate set of methods required by a simple layered fabrication system, and we discuss an implementation of those methods for a modeling format, implicit solid modeling, that has not previously been directly supported by SFF systems. Since for any modeling system, SFF relies on the construction of the layers or slices through the part, we pay particular attention to describing a slicing implementation for implicit solids.