Process Planning of Creating a Surface Dome with Bead Deposition Additive Manufacturing

摘要

Bead deposition additive manufacturing processes deposit material from a machine head onto the substrate to make the product. This can encompass plastic materials or metal powder via a direct metal deposition process. In order to minimize or even eliminate the need for support structures in making complex parts, a 5 axis motion between the machine head and substrate is needed for components with overhanging geometry. Providing 5 axis movement increases the flexibility of the machine in such a way that the nozzle axis and the substrate normal do not exceed the maximum allowed overhang angle. This eliminates or reduces the need for support structure for making complex parts. However, 5 axis machines increase the complexity of the process and the possibility of a collision between the machine head, the substrate, or previously deposited layers. This paper focuses on process planning of complex parts in order to eliminate a collision condition. As a case study the methodology is applied to build a surface dome by a 5 axis bead deposition based additive manufacturing. Partitioning strategies are applied to eliminate the collision possibility while addressing the construction of overhanging geometry.