Support slimming for single material based additive manufacturing

orientation-driven shape optimization approach is presented in this paper to show how a given model can be deformed so that the usage of the support structure is significantly reduced in AM with a single material. Layered fabrication based on the FDM method (middle left) and on the SLA method (middle right) can both benefit from this work to improve the efficiency of the manufacturing and the quality of the finished models. In layer-based additive manufacturing (AM), supporting structures need to be inserted to support the overhanging regions. The adding of supporting structures slows down the speed of fabrication and introduces artifacts onto the finished surface. We present an orientation-driven shape optimizer to slim down the supporting structures used in single material-based AM. The optimizer can be employed as a tool to help designers to optimize the original model to achieve a more self-supported shape, which can be used as a reference for their further design. The model to be optimized is first enclosed in a volumetric mesh, which is employed as the domain of computation. The optimizer is driven by the operations of reorientation taken on tetrahedra with ‘facing-down ’ surface facets. We formulate the demand on minimizing shape variation as global rigidity energy. The local optimization problem for determining a minimal rotation is analyzed on the Gauss sphere, which leads to a closed-form solution. Moreover, we also extend our approach to create the functions of controlling the deformation and searching for optimal printing directions