Cylindricity and flatness optimization for mechanical parts in additive manufacturing based on tolerance adaptive slicing

This paper presents a tolerance-based adaptive slicing (TAS) method to find an optimal trade-off between the manufacturing time and the print quality for the region of mechanical parts with geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) requirements. Compared with other traditional adaptive slicing algorithms, the cylindricity and flatness are chosen as the form metric which can improve the part surface quality and assembly performance for functionalized additive manufacturing. For different characteristics in assembly, especially refers to holes and shafts, maximum inscribed cylinder (MIC) and minimum circumscribed cylinder (MCC) are applied respectively to obtain a more precise axis position. An improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to optimize the layer amount under given requirements. Furthermore, the build time considering inside, surface, and support characteristics is optimized with the optimal layer amount to reduce the expensive computation. The performance of our approach is demonstrated by experimental tests on the typical example and the build time can be reduced by 26.97% than the least layer amount uniform slicing which meets the cylindricity error requirement. Several physical experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm using optical profiler.