The Application of the Skipped Layer Interior Method and Higher Depostition Height to Accelerate Fabrication Speed of the Model Maker Rapid Prototyping System

Abstract

The Model Maker (MM) process is one of the jet deposition rapid prototyping (RP) systems that delivers material through a jet and deposits the liquefied material onto a platform to build a physical model. The fabrication speed of the MM model is extremely low because of the low deposition rate and cutting operation. In order to accelerate the fabrication speed of the MM, the line pitch of the MM processing parameters was reconfigured to increase the deposition rate and, hence, increase the deposition height. The cutting operation of the MM removes almost half of the deposited material because of the requirements of model accuracy and layer thickness. In order to reduce the amount of the removed material, a skipped layer interior method was employed. The reconfiguration of the line pitch to increase deposition height enabled more interior layers to be skipped and, hence, less deposited material was removed. Therefore, the fabrication speed was significantly accelerated. The results show that the average model printing time saved was around 40% for all layer thicknesses, while the model accuracy and the layer thickness were still the same as in the original MM process.