Research on curved surface 3D printing system based on rotary cylinder

Abstract

FDM technology faces pain points such as poor forming surface quality, dependence on support structures, low consumable utilization, and low printing efficiency. Although robotic arm-based 3D printing technology can solve some of the pain points, there is currently no mature solution to comprehensively solve these problems. Considering the FDM printing characteristics of the spiral structure, a curved surface 3D printing system based on rotary cylinder was proposed. Rotary cylinder structure is used as the surface printing abasement, a plane-based curved path planning method is proposed for generating the plane-based curved paths. The classical plane-based path planning theory is applied in the proposed curved path planning method by means of a mapping process from the cylindrical 3D curved path to the cylindrical 2D. The test experiments verify the feasibility of this scheme and its progressiveness. Compared to the path planning methods of ModelLight and Cura software in the plane 3D printing technology, the proposed rotating 3D printing system significantly improves printing efficiency and saves hundreds of times the memory occupied by generated printing files, and provides better surface quality and higher material utilization. This work lays the foundation for the subsequent research on high-speed 3D printing systems.