Efficient toolpath planning for collaborative material extrusion machines
ISSN: 1355-2546
Article publication date: 13 June 2023
Issue publication date: 18 October 2023
Abstract
Purpose
Timing constraints affect the manufacturing of traditional large-scale components through the material extrusion technique. Thus, researchers are exploring using many independent and collaborative heads that may work on the same part simultaneously while still producing an appealing final product. The purpose of this paper is to propose a simple and repeatable approach for toolpath planning for gantry-based n independent extrusion heads with effective collision avoidance management.
Design/methodology/approach
This research presents an original toolpath planner based on existing slicing software and the traditional structure of G-code files. While the computationally demanding component subdivision task is assigned to computer-aided design and slicing software to build a standard G-code, the proposed algorithm scans the conventional toolpath data file, quickly isolates the instructions of a single extruder and inserts brief pauses between the instructions if the non-priority extruder conflicts with the priority one.
Findings
The methodology is validated on two real-life industrial large-scale components using architectures with two and four extruders. The case studies demonstrate the method's effectiveness, reducing printing time considerably without affecting the part quality. A static priority strategy is implemented, where one extruder gets priority over the other using a cascade process. The results of this paper demonstrate that different priority strategies reflect on the printing efficiency by a factor equal to the number of extrusion heads.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to produce an original methodology to efficiently plan the extrusion heads' trajectories for a collaborative material extrusion architecture.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Marco Boattini of Mechanical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Bologna for his support of the research.
Declarations: This research received no specific grant from public, commercial or not-for-profit funding agencies. The authors reported no potential conflict of interest. Data and codes are available under request and agreements.
Citation
Bacciaglia, A. and Ceruti, A. (2023), "Efficient toolpath planning for collaborative material extrusion machines", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 29 No. 9, pp. 1814-1828. https://doi.org/10.1108/RPJ-09-2022-0320
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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