3D-Printing Plates without “Support”

When printing a plate (or dish) by an FDM 3D printer, the process normally requires support material, which causes several problems. This paper proposes a method for forming thin plates without using wasteful support material. This method requires several extraordinary parameter values when slicing plates. The experiments show that the plates can, for the most part, be successfully formed using a conventional slicer and a 3D printer; however, seams between layers spoil them and the quality of printed objects strongly depends on the slicer. Keywords—Fused deposition modeling (FDM), 3D printing, Support-less, Layer seam, Slicer. I. PRINTING PLATES USING A CONVENTIONAL METHOD HEN shaping an object with a 3D printer, we first design it using a software tool for computer-aided design (CAD) and generate an object model. The model is represented by a language format called STL (Stereolithography or Standard Triangulated Language). The model is then sliced into thin layers, divided to strings, and translated into G-code [7], which is a language format used by 3D printers. The above process makes the design printable (i.e., able to be formed). One type of 3D printing that layers melted plastic, such as Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or polylactic acid (PLA) is called fused-deposition-modeling (FDM). An FDM-type printer melts plastic into strings (filaments) and layers them following a G-code program.