Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing

Path planning is a fundamental process-planning task in layered manufacturing. However, currently, most researches focus on path planning of homogeneous objects and few approaches for path planning of functionally graded material objects have been reported in the literature. Unlike homogeneous objects, functionally graded materials objects contain continuously varying material information as well as geometry information, which makes their path planning more complex and difficult than those of homogeneous objects. This paper presents an approach for path planning of functionally graded material objects. First, the continuous material distribution in each layer is changed into discrete step-wise gradings by subdividing the functionally graded materials slice into multimaterial subregions, which can be regarded as homogeneous material regions so that the functionally graded material layer can be built by mixing materials into desired volume ratio. Then the tool paths and process parameters for each multimaterial subregion in the slice are generated separately. An algorithm that summarized the procedure is described and an example is also presented.