Um algoritmo para geração de estruturas de suporte em árvore para manufatura aditiva

Abstract

Additive manufacturing consists of building objects from the deposition of successive layers of material. Depending on the manufacturing technology, layer regions that do not have direct support on a lower layer can experience deformation, and for this reason, building additional support structures is essential to manufacture an object correctly. However, support structures can greatly increase the amount material and incur in increasing processing and fabrication times. This monograph describes a method for computing support structures in the form of trees, aiming to reduce the amount of material needed for fabrication. Tree construction is based on looking for connections between support points to achieve lower material cost. The search for connections can be quite expensive considering an exhaustive search, for this reason, the developed method uses a breadth first search to look for pairs of closest support points, with the objective of reducing the computational time and also obtaining the reduction of the amount of material. Experiments were carried out for different three-dimensional models to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.