Journal
RAPID PROTOTYPING JOURNAL
Volume 21, Issue 6, Pages 725-734Publisher
EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1108/RPJ-07-2013-0073
Keywords
Advanced manufacturing technologies; Rapid prototyping; Slicing
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Purpose - Layered manufacturing with curved layers is a recently proposed rapid prototyping (RP) strategy for the manufacture of curved, thin and shell-type parts and the repair of worn surfaces, etc. The present investigation indicates another possible application area. In case of flat-layered RP of computer-aided design models having randomly located, small-dimensioned but critical surface features, adaptive slicing is resorted to. Large number of thin slices have to be employed to preserve the critical features. In contrast, a considerably lower number of curved thin slices would be required to preserve such surface features in case of RP with curved layers. Design/methodology/approach - The method of preservation of critical features by RP with curved layers is formulated and demonstrated for two clusters of critical features on the surface of a part. A minimum number of such curved layers is identified by application of genetic algorithms (GAs) in case of a simple example. GA evolves the shape of the curved layer passing through the lower cluster so as to make a curved layer pass through the upper cluster of critical features. Findings - In the example part, a 21 per cent reduction in the number of layers is achieved by the application of adaptive curved layers over adaptive straight layers. Originality/value - The novelty of the concept is the proposed use of curved layered RP with adaptive slicing for the preservation of critical features in final prototyped part. This methodology, applied to part with two distinct clusters, leads to reduced number of layers compared to that obtained in flat-layered RP.
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