Optimization of process planning for reducing material consumption in additive manufacturing

The emergence of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies brings in the reduction of material consumption in terms of avoiding the repeated fabrication of dies as well as comparatively high material efficiency. However, despite of widespread application and evident advantages over conventional manufacturing techniques, AM still suffers from long lead time and redundant material usage when fabricating large-volume solid objects. This fact would definitely restrict the diffusion of AM technology. Based on this, a design strategy is proposed in this paper from the perspective of process planning focusing on the material consumption in additive manufacturing of relatively large-volume solid parts. Instead of processing the digital models directly, the sliced data of digital models is adopted for the design and optimization, and finally outputting the paths driving the AM machine to realize the practical fabrication. The sliced contours of the model are obtained based on a given layer thickness at first. Subsequently, the areas to be filled on each layer are determined according to the input contours and the self-supporting capability of the material. The interior regions confined by the generated internal contours do not need to be filled necessarily because they have no effect on the parts' geometry and the materials can be saved accordingly. At last, a skeleton-based path planning method is utilized to address the long and narrow geometry to improve the deposition performance and surface quality. Several tests are used to verify the proposed strategy and the results show its effectiveness and feasibility in reducing the material consumption, enabling AM to be a more environmental friendly and sustainable manufacturing method.