Real time adaptive slicing for fused deposition modelling

Improvement of part surface quality and geometric accuracy in Rapid Prototyping has been a major concern. Reduction in build time and increase of part surface quality are two factors which contradict with each other as decreasing build time detracts part quality because of staircase effect. There has been a number of attempts to tackle this problem and adaptive slicing procedures are proposed. In these procedures the layer edge profiles are implicitly assumed as rectangular. But in real practice the edge profiles of a layer manufactured part are not rectangular and is found to be parabolic in case of Fused Deposition Modelling. A geometrical parameter known as cusp height is limited to a pre-specified value in existing adaptive slicing procedures, which is defined for rectangular edge profiles only. In this paper, a slicing procedure is proposed for Fused Deposition Modelling based on real time edge profile of deposited layers. The procedure is implemented and examples are included to explain the adaptive slicing method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.