Research on Curved Layer Slicing and Spatial Path Generation Method in Five-axis Material Extrusion Process

Abstract

The traditional additive manufacturing technology uses a plane-cutting method, and the printing path of each layer is limited to a single plane. When printing thin-walled parts, there are problems such as high surface displacement, poor mechanical properties, and the need to add support structure. The paper proposes a five-axis additive manufacturing technology using curved surface slice method. Specifically, it includes a triangular mesh vertex offset surface slicing algorithm based on half-edge data structure and a path planning algorithm based on triangular mesh adjacent topology and geodesic distance field; a series-parallel hybrid five-axis material extrusion printing device has been developed, which fully combines the advantages of the small cumulative error of the parallel mechanism and the large working space of the series mechanism. The proposed surface cutting and path planning method is used to print thin-walled spherical parts and skull substitutes. The surface roughness of the printed parts is significantly improved. The results show the correctness and feasibility of the algorithm.