Optimizing Part Quality with Orientation

The orientation of SFF-manufactured parts can have a significant effect on the quality of the parts, in both surface effects and strength. Currently, orientation is either ignored or set on the basis of experience. This paper takes some simple experiments and creates quantitative measures relating different aspects of part quality to orientation. This leads to several computational tools for optimizing the orientation of a part for manufacture with SLS or SALD on the basis of part strength, surface "aliasing" error, volumetric supports, and build time as an alternative to human experts.