| Abstract Scope |
Support structures are often needed in additive manufacturing (AM) to print overhangs. However, they are the extra materials that must be removed afterwards. When the supports have many contacts to the model or are even enclosed inside some concavities, removing them is very challenging and has a risk of damaging the part. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop a new type of tree-support, named escaping tree-support (ET-Sup), which tries to build all the supports onto the build plate to minimize the number of contact points. All the operations are performed efficiently with the help of a ray representation. The method is tested on different overhang features, including a lattice ball and a mushroom shape with a concave cap. All the supports generated for the examples can find their way to the build plate. The computation time is around one second for these cases. |