• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.163-173
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• 1996

Stereolithography is a process used to rapidly produce polymer components directly form a computer representation of the part. There are several considerations to be made for the efficient use of the process. Especially, the build-up orientation of part critically affects the part accuracy, total build time and the volume of support structures. The purpose of tis study is to determine the optimal build-up part orientation for the SLA process with improving part accuracy, and minimizing total build time and the volume of support structures. The forst factor is related to the area of surfaces whioch have staircase protrusions after solidification, the second factor is related to the total number of layers, and the third factor is related to the area of the surfaces which need to be supported with support structures. An algorithm is developed to calculate the staircase area, quantifying the process errors by the volume of materials supposed to be removed or added to the part, and the optimal layer thickness for the SLA system which can handle the variable layer thickness. So the optima l part orientation is determined based on the user's selections of primary criter- ion and the optimal thickness of layers is calculated at any part orientations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.552-558
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• 1995

Stereolithography is a process used to rapidly produce polymer components directly from a computer-representation of the part. There are several considerations to be made for the efficient use of te process. Especially, the build-up orientation of part critically affect to the part accuracy, total build time and the volume of support structures. Te purpose of this study is to determine the optimal build-up part orientation for the SLA process with improving part accuracy, minimizing total build time, and the volume of supprot structures. The first factor is related to the area of surfaces which have staircase protrusions after solidification, the second factor is related to the total number of layers, and the third factor is related to the area of the surfaces which need to be supported with support structures. An algorithm is developed to calculate the staircase area with quantifying the process planning errors that the volume of materials is supposed to be removed or added to the part, and the optimal layer thickness for the SLA system whichcan hadle the variable layer thickness in different orientations achieved by rotating the given part to the specified finite directions. So the optimal part orientation is determined based on the user's selections of primary criterion and the optimal thickness of layers is calculated at any part orientations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2003.06a
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• pp.18-21
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• 2003

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) parts are made by piling up thin layers that cause the stair stepping effect at the surface of FDM parts. This effect brings about poor surface roughness of the part and requires additional post machining such as manual finishing that is detrimental to the part geometry and time consuming. Determining optimal build orientation for FDM parts can be one solution to minimize the post machining. However, by using the CAD model, calculating the optimal build orientation is impractical due to heavy computing process. In order to calculate the optimal build orientation with high speed. the surface roughness model based on measured data and interpolation is newly developed in this research. Also. the genetic algorithm (GA) is applied for acquiring reliable solution. Finally, It is verified from the test that the presented approach is very efficient for reducing the additional post machining process fer FDM parts.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.154-161
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• 1998

Prototypes of a design are always needed for the purpose of visualization and evaluation in the aspect of manufacturability functionality, and aesthetic appearance. Since the prototyping process requires a significant amount of cost and time, various rapid prototyping processes are recently being introduced in the process. However, it is usually necessary for a part built up by a rapid prototyping system to be refined by a post-processing process, in which the stair steps on the surfaces, the support structures (if they exist), and the unprocessed material are eliminated. This post-processing is usually done manually and is a time-consuming task. Especially, eliminating the trapped volumes, the volume of the unprocessed material entrapped by the solidified portion, is sometimes impossible in some processes. This study provides a designer with a tool to detect the existence and to calculate the quantity of the trapped volumes at the given build-up direction, so that the proper build-up direction is chosen or the part is built by pieces to avoid the problems caused by the trapped volumes in advance. Since the proposed algorithm can efficiently calculate the amount of the trapped volumes at any build-up direction, it has the potential of such application as optimizing the build-up direction to minimize the trapped volumes.