| Abstract Scope |
Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3d printing, has become a hot topic in academia and industry in the past decades. For a typical layer-based additive manufacturing where the object is printed in a layer-by-layer fashion, the battle to reduce or even eradicate the support structure is always faced by researchers and industrial practitioners. The newly emerging multi-axis printing platform inspired by the five-axis machine tool opens new directions, such as surface quality improvement, support-free printing, etc. In this paper, we have presented a framework for the support-free hollowing of 3+2-axis printing. A suite of algorithms including curved skeleton extraction, print sequence optimization, hollowing generation, and print path planning is introduced. It is expected that the print efficiency will improve while the residue artifacts caused by the support structure on the contact surface can ultimately be eradicated. |