Volumetric Error Control in Layered Manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for adaptive slicing based on volumetric error considerations for Layered Manufacturing (LM). In the general LM process uses constant layer thickness throughout the part height which leads to poor surface finish at inclined surfaces. Therefore, adaptive slicing was proposed to control the surface roughness by adaptively selecting the layer thickness based on surface finish at a particular angle or slope of the surface. Most of the researchers used the cusp height concept for adaptive slicing. However, limitation of cusp height based adaptive slicing procedure is that, it does not have any direct control on volumetric error and it is quite possible that with a very little variation in cusp height a large variation in volumetric error may occur on steep slopes of surface. In the proposed work an algorithm is developed and implemented for adaptive slicing to control/select layer thickness based on user specified volumetric error/loss. A model is developed to calculate volumetric loss for the particular layer considering the geometry of the model.