Cálculo de regiões de estruturas de suporte para manufatura aditiva com uso de imagens

Abstract

One of the main steps in the process planning of additive manufacturing is the computation of support structures. Approaches to perform this step commonly use information from triangle meshes of a 3D model or polygon information obtained after slicing the model. Polygon-based approaches perform operations such as polygon dilation and subtraction considering self-support angles, formed between adjacent slices, that drive the need for support in a region. These same operations have very simple and robust implementations when the manipulated data is represented as images instead of polygons. However, due to the need for discretization of polygonal data to images, there may be inaccuracies in angle calculations that defne the need for support. A study is presented showing that by increasing the resolution of images it is possible to correct these inaccuracies, however, very high resolutions may be needed and make the use of images unfeasible, due to memory or processing demands. The proposed solution integrates the information about the angles in the triangular mesh of a model with the conversion of the slice polygons into images. In this way, it is possible to solve problems related to angles and precisely determine the regions where support structures should be generated. In the experimental results, the output of the proposed algorithm is compared with the expected output for some models, showing that the supports are correctly computed. Also, some improvements in the support are analyzed, such as the generation of structures in the form of columns, which can be easily obtained when performing operations on images.