Curved-layered material extrusion modeling for thin-walled parts by a 5-axis machine

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to solve the problems of poor mechanical properties, high surface roughness and waste support materials of thin-walled parts fabricated by flat-layered additive manufacturing process.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a curved-layered material extrusion modeling process with a five-axis motion mechanism. This process has advantages of the platform rotating, non-support printing and three-dimensional printing path. First, the authors present a curved-layered algorithm by offsetting the bottom surface into a series of conformal surfaces and a toolpath generation algorithm based on the geodesic distance field in each conformal surface. Second, they introduce a parallel five-axis printing machine consisting of a printing head fixed on a delta-type manipulator and a rotary platform on a spherical parallel machine.

Findings

Mechanical experiments show the failure force of the five-axis printed samples is 153% higher than that of the three-axis printed samples. Forming experiments show that the surface roughness significantly decreases from 42.09 to 18.31 µm, and in addition, the material consumption reduces by 42.90%. These data indicate the curved-layered algorithm and five-axis motion mechanism in this paper could effectively improve mechanical properties and the surface roughness of thin-walled parts, and realize non-support printing. These methods also have reference value for other additive manufacturing processes.

Originality/value

Previous researchers mostly focus on printing simple shapes such as arch or “T”-like shape. In contrast, this study sets out to explore the algorithm and benefits of modeling thin-walled parts by a five-axis machine. Several validated models would allow comparability in five-axis printing.

Citation

Feng, X., Cui, B., Liu, Y., Li, L., Shi, X. and Zhang, X. (2021), "Curved-layered material extrusion modeling for thin-walled parts by a 5-axis machine", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 27 No. 7, pp. 1378-1387. https://doi.org/10.1108/RPJ-11-2020-0272