Fast interior filling of Model Maker models using a spraying nozzle to accelerate build speed

Abstract

Model Maker (MM) is a commercial rapid prototyping (RP) system using tiny jets to deposit thermoplastic materials onto a platform to build physical models and the associated support structures. Also, a cutter is employed to plane off the deposited surface in order to maintain smaller layer thickness and hence, model accuracy. The model’s accuracy is mainly affected by the profile layer thickness. The interior filling does not affect the model accuracy or layer thickness very much, but it significantly affects the building time. Hence, a new interior fast filling of MM using a spraying nozzle is proposed in this paper. The detail design, construction, and evaluation of the new proposed fast interior‐spraying process are presented. The results show that the building time using spaying nozzle is only 15 per cent of the time used by the original process.