Layer thickness control

Abstract

The use of multi-axis additive manufacturing has enabled the possiblity to fabricate parts using curved layer deposition. Compared to the traditional deposition using planar layers of a fixed thickness, multiaxis additive manufacturing significantly increases the number of possible fabrication sequences. With the introduction of a time component for topology optimization in recent work, fabrication-processdependent physics can now be incorporated in the optimization process. The fabrication sequence resulting from such complex optimizations can lead to layers with large variations in thickness. For manufacturability reasons, considering multi-axis additive manufacturing, this variation should be controlled. In this thesis, we present a method to control the variation in thickness of the projected layers to improve the manufacturability. We use the continuous pseudo-time field and its gradients to track the development of the layer boundaries. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we apply the thickness control method on a fabrication sequence optimization for minimizing thermal distortion. The results show that the proposed method is able to reduce the variation of thicknesses compared to the original sequence optimization without thickness control resulting in improved manufacuturability.