AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF TOOTHED SUPPORT STRUCTURE IN LAYERED MANUFACTURING

摘要

Layered Manufacturing (LM), where a physical part is constructed layer by layer, is the basic technology of rapid prototyping. There are many different processes available for LM, and some of them require external support structures, which prevent the part from warping, sagging, or toppling during the building process, such as FDM and SLA. Good support structures are robust, as small as possible, and easy to remove. Support structures greatly influence the efficiency of the building process and the final quality of the part. Automatic support structure generation often becomes a very difficult task because of the diversity and the complexity of the geometric information of a model. This paper gives an algorithm for automatic generation of toothed support structure which is applied to SLA, the most popular process in RP field. The author introduces "Support Line" and "Support Point" and makes use of the intrinsic topological information of a STL model to accelerate the algorithm.