Printing Direction Optimization Through Slice Number and Support Minimization

One major drawback of 3D printing technologies is the low printing efficiency. In general, it takes 8–12 hours to print a normal 3D model. 3D printing technologies manufacture objects layer by layer where each layer is composed of one or more closed 2D polygons (named as slices in this work). As a result, the number of slices will directly affects the printing time. In addition, most 3D printing technologies need extra supporting structures to support overhang regions during printing, such as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), which will largely increase manufacturing time. We observe that both the slicing number and the amount of supporting structures are affected by printing direction. In this work, a novel printing direction optimization algorithm is proposed based on the amount of slices and overhang areas. In the proposed method, Genetic Algorithm is used to obtain optimal printing direction where the fitness function is designed as the weighted slice number and overhang areas. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to obtain an optimal printing direction to reduce the number of slices and overhang areas.