Direct slicing of surface model for RP of thin-wall objects

摘要

Rapid Prototyping(RP) methods have been widely accepted by industry in recent years. Most rapid prototyping processes build the solid volume layer by layer. This has the disadvantage that tessellation of a solid model to a faceted one is always required for hte slicing process. the present work focuses on eliminating the tessellation step an reducing processing time by direct slicing of the surface model. The slicing process produces piecewise edge information, which is used to generate the loop and path information of the RP process. The edge information can be offset to generate path information for RP of thin-walled objects. The number of entities for sorting is greatly reduced in rearranging the edge information as compared against the point information in seteroelithography(STL) format. This helps to achieve faster slicing and reduce the error in the sorting proess. Projection algorithm, which detects topological change between layers, is introduced during slicing process. With the help of this algorithm, sorting and rearanging of loop information is need only when topological changes are detected which rearanging of loo information is need only when toplogical changes are deteced which reducesthe processing time. The detail ofthe slicing process nd coparison will STL slicing will be discussed in this paper.