EXPLORATION OF FLEXIBLE BLADE CURVATURE FOR FREE FORM THICK LAYERED OBJECT MANUFACTURING

摘要

The FF-TLOM (Free Form Thick Layered Object Manufacturing) technology is a Rapid Prototyping process based on flexible blade cutting of polystyrene foam. The heated blade is shaped by three parameters, which allows an infinite amount of minimum strain energy blade shapes of none, one or two inflexions. The shaping domain consists of stable and unstable blade shapes. Stable shapes are defined as none and one-inflexion curves. These curves are used for successful cutting of foam with the FF-TLOM technology. For tool path calculations a set of possible blade shapes are matched with a restricted amount of object (nominal) curves along the layer periphery. Successful matches define a set of blade poses from which a tool path is generated. The blade curvature is applied to detect and to avoid plastic deformation of the flexible blade material by exclusion of the related parameter settings from the blade shaping parameter domain. In order to facilitate and reduce the effort of curve matching, the relation between blade curvature and blade shaping parameters is investigated and presented. Maximum blade curvature and its location are detected and are applied to improve the matching activity in an effective way. The aim during curve matching is to provide a reduction of the blade shaping parameter domain by targeting on possible successful matches using a simple method to select those parameters, which will have a successful match.