Improving printing orientation for Fused Deposition Modeling printers by analyzing connected components

The spatial orientation of an object on a 3D printing plate is a significant contributor to its printing time. Thus, the speed of the 3D printing processes can generally be increased by using time-efficient object orientations. This paper presents a novel method for speeding-up printing processes that employs maximally efficient orientations. This method finds an orientation for the object that minimizes the number of disconnected components and the distance between the disconnected components that remain, thereby minimizing the time needed for the printer head to traverse empty areas. The method also considers the height of the printed object, its trapped volume, and the number of connected components in each layer. Our novel algorithm considers all four criteria, each weighted according to printer-specific and experimentally-obtained parameters. Preliminary trials demonstrate that this methodology can decrease printing times on fused deposition printers to 45% of that of current state of the art algorithms.