General Support-Effective Decomposition for Multi-Directional 3D Printing
This addresses the challenge of reducing support structures and manual assembly in multi-directional 3D printing for manufacturing applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of fabricating general 3D models with multi-directional 3D printing by minimizing overhang areas through a support-effective volume decomposition algorithm, enabling direct single-pass printing without manual assembly and verifying effectiveness on two hardware systems with various models.
We present a method for fabricating general models with multi-directional 3D printing systems by printing different model regions along with different directions. The core of our method is a support-effective volume decomposition algorithm that minimizes the area of the regions with large overhangs. A beam-guided searching algorithm with manufacturing constraints determines the optimal volume decomposition, which is represented by a sequence of clipping planes. While current approaches require manually assembling separate components into a final model, our algorithm allows for directly printing the final model in a single pass. It can also be applied to models with loops and handles. A supplementary algorithm generates special supporting structures for models where supporting structures for large overhangs cannot be eliminated. We verify the effectiveness of our method using two hardware systems: a Cartesian-motion based system and an angular-motion based system. A variety of 3D models have been successfully fabricated on these systems.