Contour generation for layered manufacturing with reduced part distortion

Layered manufacturing has emerged as a highly versatile process to produce complex parts compared with conventional manufacturing processes, which are either too costly to implement or just downright not possible. However, this relatively new manufacturing process is characterized by a few outstanding issues that have kept the process from being widely applied. One such issue is the reduced part accuracy caused by the primitive method of generating the layer contours. Current practice generates the layer contours by simply intersecting a set of parallel planes through the computer model of the design part. The volumetric geometry of each layer is then constructed by extruding the layer contour by the layer thickness in the part building direction. This practice often leads to distorted part geometry due to the unidirectional bias of the extruded layers. This paper proposes a novel scheme to correct the systematic part distortion of layered manufactured parts resulting from the improperly generated layer contours. A new layer contour generation method utilizing the sectional projected data of a point cloud representation of the part surface is introduced. The systematic part distortion is reduced by extruding the outer boundary of the projected point data into the layer volumetric geometry. The boundary contour construction algorithm is able to adapt to changing density of the point set in order to keep the captured level of detail consistent. Specifically devised case studies were carried out to validate the proposed method.