Feature-Based Slicing for Layered Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract Layered manufacturing (LM) has become an indispensable manufacturing technology for product design and development. Competition pressure demands high quality LM part within an even shorter lead time. This requires an efficient fabrication strategy for LM. In contrast to prevalent LM methods whereby each layer is uniformly deposited with same layer thickness, we are exploring a different approach for LM. That is, fabrication strategies are localized to best meet the design specification of each individual feature in the part. Therefore, slicing, deposition path planning, etc., are done separately for each feature volume to get the best quality for that feature volume. Specifically, in this paper, we present a feature-based slicing method, which localizes the slicing for each individual feature volume. We propose the concept of feature interaction volume and describe how the part volume can be decomposed into refined feature volumes and feature interaction volumes. In refined feature volumes, the fabrication strategies are completely independent of the neighboring volumes. Some examples are presented to validate the feature-based slicing method.