• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.115-121
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• 2003

A new Layered Manufacturing(LM) system, named PaperMill, is developed applying micro milling technology. A micro endmill(127 11m in diameter) is introduced as the cutter of build material. The selected build material for this system is an adhesive-coated paper roll which provides advantages such as good bonding between layers, machinability, and low material cost. A 3-axis CNC controller and three step-motors are used for the movement of X-Y-Z table of the system. For simplicity of the control of mechanism, the control system for feeding the paper roll is uncoupled from CNC controller. Two code converters are developed for the toolpath generation of the new LM system. The NC converter generates a set of NC codes for PaperMill using commercial CAM software while the SML converter generates an NC code from Quickslice's SML format. The NC codes generated from the converters consist of a series of profile data and trigger code for paper feeding. Two sample gears were fabricated to prove the concept of the system, which shown that the dimensional errors of the fabricated gears is under 3.4 percent.