Research On The Support Generation Of Fused Deposition Modeling

Support generation is one of the key technologies of FDM system. It can reduce the misses and errors which are often taken place in the manual design of support structure. Also it is one of the necessary functions of rapid prototype system software. This thesis is about some research works in support generation which applies to the FDM based on the consideration of the support's rationality.The type and structure of support is studied based on the feature of FDM process. A design principle is put forward. After studied the feature of STL model, for building suitable support structure, the triangle faces are sorted as to-be-supported faces, suspending faces, cantilevering faces, suspending edges and suspending points. And the arithmetic used in the identification of them is achieved. Furthermore, a rapid facet-combination arithmetic based on the hash table is put forward which is the key part in the face combination. This arithmetic can be applied to the practice ad its fast speed in face combination and low time complexity.For building the support structure, the boundary of the to-be-supported region is picked up and its projection on the working plane is calculated. One support generation method which used 2-D polygon Boolean operation is put forward. It can avoid the complicated surface clipping and can be easily achieved. Furthermore, the support structures applied to suspending edges and suspending points are also discussed here.The line-scan support generation which is original proposed by our laboratory is improved by adding the feature of Z direction. After the improvement the support structure is more suitable.