3D printing speed optimization by minimizing void paths

Though the field of 3D printing has seen substantial innovation since its inception, printing speeds remain slow. The spatial orientation of a working piece on the building plate plate is a significant contributor to its printing time. We present a novel solution based on the observation that the printing head must start and stop deposition when traveling between separate regions of a printed layer. Our method finds an orientation for the object that minimizes the distance between the disconnected components, thereby minimizing the time needed for the printer head to traverse empty areas. The method also considers the height of the printed object, its trapped volume, and the number of connected components in each layer. We provide an optimization strategy that considers all four criteria, each weighted according to printer-specific and experimentally-obtained parameters. Printing speeds in our trial are improved by up to 45% by adding the criterion of disconnected component distance to the optimization