Mass Customization: Reuse of Topology Information to Accelerate Slicing Process for Continuous Liquid Interface Production

Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, constructs a 3D object in a layer by layer fashion. Comparing to traditional manufacturing technologies, it can build objects with complex individualized features with little extra effort. This characteristic endows additive manufacturing with the potential to realize mass customization. Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP), a newly emerged Stereolithography Apparatus (SLA) based AM process, can create a solid object by using video projection as the energy source to cure the liquid photo-sensitive polymer resin. This process works in a continuous fashion, so it can achieve extremely high productivity that is crucial to mass customization. CLIP adopts a great number of images which are corresponding to cross-sectional geometric patterns as input, but this poses a challenge regarding to slice generation. The slice computation procedure for a single customized model can take hours to complete, and the time consumption becomes more prominent in mass customization, which fabricates numerous models in the same batch. Based on the observation that similarities exist among most customized products, we proposed a new slicing paradigm. This slicing paradigm reuses topology information obtained from the template model for other customized products of the same category, and the idea of topology information reuse is implemented in three levels, including self reuse, intra-model reuse, and inter-model reuse. Experimental results show that the proposed slicing paradigm can significantly reduce the time consumption on pre-fabrication computation.