Research Of Additive Manufacturing Software For NC Welding System

The wire arc additive manufacturing(WAAM)technology has the advantages of high deposition efficiency,high utilization of silk material,lower cost and fewer restrictions on the size of components,repairing parts conveniently,etc.The key of the additive manufacturing(AM)technology is the software,especially the model processing software which is used on the data conversion from the components model to the AM equipment.The development of the AM software used for welding system has important significance for promoting the research and development of AM.This paper detailed studied the core functions of loading model,slicing and route planning in the AM model processing software.At present,the standard data interface file which is applied to the rapid prototype system is the STL file.After analyzing the structure characteristics of the STL files in two different formats,the paper designed the loading modules of the two kinds of STL format files.Then the model data were offset,and the model was placed in the middle of the virtual machining space.The STL file does not contain topology information so the software in this paper designed the function of calculating the triangle topological information in the model in order to improve the efficiency of slicing.The STL model was sliced directly.This paper designed the algorithm of calculating the intersecting line segments of the tangent plane and the triangle in model,and then obtained the outline data in every layer.The software added the outline optimization function.And in this function,we can remove the short line segments without affecting the machining accuracy in the WAAM.The paper developed the layer data display module,using GDI function in MFC programming of C++ to realize the visualization of layer point data.The layer outline was divided into a plurality of independent regions.According to the different situations of every individual region,the paper took a different path planning method.For the convex polygon outlines which have uniform wall thickness,the software used outline offset scanning and filling path planning;and for the concave polygon outlines and the contour with many inner holes,the software designed linear reciprocating scan filling path planning.The NC machining program conversion module is developed which can be used to process the NC machining program used in most of NC welding equipment.The experiment was carried out to prove that the software function is complete and the operation is basically stable and reliable.