An Output-sensitive Algorithm for Generating Island Scanning Paths with Applications in SLM Additive Manufacturing

Selected Laser Melting (SLM) is a major type of technique of Additive Manufacturing for fabricating complicated 3D metal models that are used in aeronautic, medical and automotive industries. Island scanning strategy has been shown to be an effective means for melting the metal powders into solids with less distortion and cracking. However, existing literature and the handouts of the commercial software have not shown how to compute the island scanning strategy effectively for a large number of layers of a 3D printed model. In this paper, we propose an output-sensitive algorithm for generating the island scanning paths for one layer, with taking ( ) O K M times, where K is the number of laser paths in the interior the layer and M is the total number of contour edges of slice. The algorithm has been integrated into our self-developed software “Meshprint”. Three examples were simulated in “Meshprint” and were 3D printed using an SLM machine, the results validated our proposed algorithm.

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