Document Type

Article

Publication Date

January 2015

Publication Title

Solid Freeform Fabrication 2015: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium – An Additive Manufacturing Conference

First Page

1313

Last Page

1323

Disciplines

Computer-Aided Engineering and Design | Manufacturing | Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

An algorithm has been developed to estimate the “horizontal” staircase effect and a technique is proposed to reduce this type of geometrical error for freeform extrusion fabrication processes of 3D “solid” parts. The adaptive rastering technique, proposed in this paper, analyzes the geometry of each layer and changes the width of each line of the raster adaptively in order to reduce the staircase error and increase the productivity simultaneously. For each line, the maximum width that results in a staircase error smaller than a predefined threshold is determined for decreasing the fabrication time or increasing the dimensional accuracy, or both. To examine the efficacy of the proposed technique, examples are provided in which staircase errors and fabrication times are compared between uniform and adaptive rastering methods for each part. The results show a considerable improvement in accuracy and/or fabrication time for all parts studied when using the adaptive rastering technique.

Comments

This paper was published in Solid Freeform Fabrication 2015: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium – An Additive Manufacturing Conference. It is included here with permission of the editor. This paper can also be found online at this link.

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