THREE-DIMENSIONAL DIGITAL HALFTONING FOR LAYERED MANUFACTURING BASED ON DROPLETS

Layered manufacturing based on droplets, such as multi-jet modeling and polyjet processes, shows great promises in fabricating accurate, smooth and highly detailed 3dimensional models. It has been widely used in fabricating prototypes and investment casting patterns. In this paper, we present a 3dimensional digital halftoning method which can significantly reduce the building time of these layered manufacturing processes. The key idea of the halftoning method is to intelligently control the printed droplet layout to form a slanted layer, which can closely match the surface of an input geometry. We present a mathematical model for finding the optimized droplet layout, and discuss various solution strategies. The experimental results showed that a revised DBS method can solve the formulated problem effectively and efficiently.