• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2017

Tool path generation is a part of process planning in 3D printing. This is done before actual printing by a computer rather than an AM machine. The mesh geometry of the 3D model is sliced layer-by-layer along the Z-axis and tool paths are generated from the sliced layers. Each 2-dimensional layer can have two types of printing paths: (i) shell and (ii) infill. Shell paths are made of offset loops. During shell generation, twists can be produced in offset loops which will cause twisted tool paths. As a twisted tool path cannot be printed, it is necessary to remove these twists during process planning. In this research, An algorithm is presented to remove twists from the offset loops. To do so the path segments are traversed to identify twisted points. Outer offset loops are represented in the counter-clockwise segment order and clockwise rotation for the inner offset loop to decide which twisted loop should be removed. After testing practical 3D models, the proposed algorithm is verified to use in tool path generation for 3D printing.