A novel fabrication strategy for additive manufacturing processes

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been increasingly developed and applied in many fields nowadays. However, it takes a long time for completing a part due to the layer-by-layer manner of AM process which is time-consuming. A variety of studies have been carried out to plan the process of AM to save fabrication time, such as increasing layer thickness to reduce total layer numbers and path planning to find the shortest total travel path to save printhead travel time. In this paper, a novel fabrication strategy for AM is proposed to save fabrication time. The novelty of this strategy is on the consideration that the part does not need to be fabricated in a layer-by-layer manner, but in a multilayer-by-multilayer manner when the part has some independent features. This strategy includes five steps. Firstly, the part needs to be positioned in an optimal print direction. Secondly, the independent features in this part needs to be detected. Thirdly, the closest distances between independent features in each sliced layer are calculated and recorded. Then the nozzle moving strategy between each independent feature can be generated based on the distance recorded in the previous step. Lastly, the part can be sent to the AM machine for final manufacture using the proposed novel fabrication strategy. A case study was carried out for validation. The results show that the proposed multilayer-by-multilayer strategy can save 1039s of time for fabricating the part in the case study, compared with conventional layer-by-layer method. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.