Computing an optimal hatching direction in layered manufacturing

Jörg Schwerdt, Michiel Smid, Man Chung Hon, Ravi Janardan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

In Layered Manufacturing (LM), a prototype of a virtual polyhedral object is built by slicing the object into polygonal layers, and then building the layers one after another. In StereoLithography, a specific LM-technology, a layer is built using a laser which follows paths along equally-spaced parallel lines and hatches all segments on these lines that are contained in the layer. We consider the problem of computing a direction of these lines for which the number of segments to be hatched is minimum, and present an algorithm that solves this problem exactly. The algorithm has been implemented and experimental results are reported for real-world polyhedral models obtained from industry.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1067-1081
Number of pages15
JournalInternational Journal of Computer Mathematics
Volume79
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was funded in part by a joint research grant by DAAD and by NSF. Research also supported in part by NSF grant CCR-9712226. We thank Stratasys, Inc. for providing us with test models and for access to their software front-end, Quickslice, to slice these models.

Keywords

  • Computational geometry
  • Layered manufacturing

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