Tight printable enclosures for additive manufacturing
2015
Additive manufacturing is a process by which a three dimensional object is
created layer after layer, through selective deposition of material.
It often requires the automated generation of auxiliary shapes, to temporarily
support the object, to protect its surface, or to carve inner cavities and
reduce material usage.
In this context, we define a ``printable enclosure'' as a minimal volume
enclosing a given shape and whose boundary can be printed at the smallest
possible thickness while ensuring proper bonding between layers.
Such an enclosure is well suited to serve as auxiliary structure for additive
manufacturing: it is easy to print and require little material. In this
paper, we demonstrate its use on three different applications: enclosing a
print within protective walls that are close to the surface; generating large
inner cavities whose walls are printable, and finally modeling support
structures that provide a dense support to the downward facing surfaces while
vanishing as quickly as possible below the supported object.
We obtain the shape of an enclosure by considering constraints on its set of slices along
horizontal planes. In practice, the set of slices is discrete and the
constraints afford for an efficient sweep-like construction algorithm using
morphological operations on the slices. We discuss the printability and
optimality of the enclosures and their boundary walls.
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