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Extended block based infill generation

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Abstract

In additive manufacturing, fused deposition modeling (FDM) is widely used for its simplicity and ease of use. However, it exhibits longer printing times compared with other types of three-dimensional printers. One of the causes of the slow printing speed is infill, which is uniform structure that uses excessive material. The recently studied block-based infill generation method effectively reduced material usage and printing time with adaptive structure through the merging and splitting of unit blocks. Methods to increase the effectiveness of the block-based infill generation method have been sought in this paper. First, the directionality of the block’s surface was increased by substituting the previously used cubic unit block with octahedron and tetrahedron unit blocks to generate infill with more flexibility. Second, a quantitative splitting algorithm was proposed to solve the determination of order and direction of infill generation, which is an NP-hard problem. In most cases, the extended block-based infill generated with these two modifications showed reduced material usage and faster printing time compared with the cubic block-based infill generated.

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Acknowledgments

The Institute of Engineering Research at Seoul National University provided research facilities for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Centered CAD Laboratory, Seoul National University, Building 301, 13F, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826, Republic of Korea

    Taeseok Lee & Jusung Lee

  2. Human Centered CAD Laboratory, Seoul National University, Building 301, 14F, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 08826, Republic of Korea

    Kunwoo Lee

Authors
  1. Taeseok Lee
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  2. Jusung Lee
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Correspondence to Kunwoo Lee.

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Lee, T., Lee, J. & Lee, K. Extended block based infill generation. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 93, 1415–1430 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-017-0572-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-017-0572-y

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