Manufacturability Feedback and Model Correction for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

M a n u fa c tu ra b ility F e e d b a c k and M o d e l C o rrectio n fo r A d d itiv e M a n u fa c tu rin g Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is the process o f building three-dimensional solid shapes by accumulating material laid out in sectional layers. Additive manufactur ing has been recognized fo r enabling production o f complex custom parts that are difficult to manufacture otherwise. However, the dependence on build orientation and physical limitations o f printing processes invariably lead to geometric deviations between manufactured and designed shapes that are usually evaluated after manufacture. In this paper, we formalize the measurement o f such deviations in terms o f a printability map that simulates the printing process and partitions each printed layer into disjoint regions with distinct local measures o f size. We show that manufacturing capabilities, such as printing resolution, and material specific design recommendations, such as minimal fe a ture sizes, may be coupled in the printability map to evaluate expected deviations before manufacture. Furthermore, we demonstrate how partitions with size measures below required resolutions may be modified using properties o f the medial axis transform and use the corrected printability map to construct a representation o f the manufactured model. We conclude by discussing several applications o f the printability map fo r additive manufacturing. RelatedWork. Existing software to analyze and prepare models for 3D printing are often intended to accompany a specific printer [1-3] and typically enable some combination of model cleanup, build direction optimization, and tool path generation. Model cleanup refers to geometric processing of the 3D model,

Representation and analysis of additively manufactured parts

“…As shown in [15], assuming openings with disks allows a characterization of S ′ in terms of local size, defined as the distance of the boundary of S ′ to its medial axis. The complement of the opening O(S ′ , kX ) by a disk kX , k > 1 will outline the regions of S ′ with thin walls that are printable but are below the recommended thickness kX for the printed material (often learned by experimentation).…”

“…For a part S and a cutting tool F the maximal set of translations of the tool to avoid cutting into the part [15] is S c ⊖ F −1 . By the dual relationship between Minkowski sum and difference 1 this set of translations is (S ⊕ F −1 ) c , also realizable as the complement of the translational configuration space obstacle seen in robot motion planning.…”

Exploring feasible design spaces for heterogeneous constraints

“…Process limitations must be considered during the design/optimization stage as much as possible to avoid repeated prototyping and iterations until the optimized designs are manufacturable. Specifically, applying corrections to the geometry [9] or topology [11] of a solution after TO to make it manufacturable may sacrifice the achieved optimality.…”

“…• binary-valued fields (Q i := {0, 1}), used to describe indicator functions of regions of interest within the design domain such as non-manufacturable features [7,8] or regions requiring design correction [9].…”

Manufacturability Oriented Model Correction and Build Direction Optimization for Additive Manufacturing

“…While the provided corrective actions improve the design significantly, it has been shown that the printability is not guaranteed. Nelaturi et al [35] use medial axis transformation together with techniques from mathematical morphology to construct a printability map and recommend design modifications. How- Fig.…”