Abstract
Great progress has been made in 2D color printing with inkjet technology, and mature related products have come out, but there still exists great developmental space in 3D color printing. Therefore, a new path planning method based on the offset curve for 3D inkjet technology is proposed in this paper. Offset curves are generated on a freeform surface with geodesic equidistance, and then points for color printing are generated along the offset curves. In this paper, the principle of color printing technology with a 5-axis platform and the offset curve path planning (OCPP) method are presented. In addition, comparisons between the OCPP and adaptive filling algorithm based on the section method (AFSM) have been implemented. The OCPP significantly increased the rate of the theoretical filling area from 0.89 to 0.99 on a freeform surface.
Highlights
That technology is currently at the exploratory stage due to the complex computation and equipment limitations
Solid Terrain Modeling (STM) company [10] in the U.S has developed a set of equipment that can make color geographical models
In our previous work [15], we proposed the adaptive filling algorithm based on the section method (AFSM) to realize color printing on a freeform surface with multi-color fused deposition modelling (FDM) technology
Summary
That technology is currently at the exploratory stage due to the complex computation and equipment limitations. The system includes a carving machine and a coloring device, which can provide users with models containing 3D geographic information and surface color information. The system is mainly applied to the military sandbox and geographical models. Some devices with 3D rapid prototyping technology were launched to make colorful parts, such as Objet500 Connex3 [11] of Stratasys. They are not widely used because of their high price. In many rapid prototyping technologies, fused deposition modelling (FDM) is becoming more and more popular due to its simple structure and low price. With the increasing demand for color parts, many researchers have started to study multi-color FDM technology.
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