A LARGE SCALE 3D PRINTING METHOD FOR SKELETONIZED SURFACES BASED ON GRAPH THEORY

Abstract

For large-scale Additive manufacturing, while manufacturing thin nonplanar components by printing contours, the printing direction is often perpendicular to the surface, so the components cannot have complex topological features. At the same time, large-scale additive manufacturing is difficult to achieve skeletonized patterns due to the nozzle size and material limitations. Most of the existing printing methods for skeletonized structure use the level set method, which is difficult to adapt to thin shells. This paper introduces a new printing method for 3D printing skeletonized surfaces. The method uses a graph-theoretic approach to plan the printing path, combining the size of the nozzle and the structure of the surface, to enable the printing of surfaces with complex topological features. A 3D printing case is used to verify and prove the practicality of the method. Experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can effectively solve the problem of printing skeletonized hyperbolic shells and can achieve a continuous printing path. However, there is still room for improvement in many areas of the method to improve print quality.