A non-retraction path planning approach for extrusion-based additive manufacturing

Notwithstanding the widespread use and large number of advantages over traditional subtractive manufacturing techniques, the application of additive manufacturing technologies is currently limited by the undesirable fabricating efficiency, which has attracted attentions from a wide range of areas, such as fabrication method, material improvement, and algorithm optimization. As a critical step in the process planning of additive manufacturing, path planning plays a significant role in affecting the build time by means of determining the paths for the printing head's movement. So a novel path filling pattern for the deposition of extrusion–based additive manufacturing is developed in this paper, mainly to avoid the retraction during the deposition process, and hence the time moving along these retracting paths can be saved and the discontinuous deposition can be avoided as well. On the basis of analysis and discussion of the reason behind the occurrence of retraction in the deposition process, a path planning strategy called “go and back” is presented to avoid the retraction issue. The “go and back” strategy can be adopted to generate a continuous extruder path for simple areas with the start point being connected to the end point. So a sliced layer can be decomposed into several simple areas and the sub-paths for each area are generated based on the proposed strategy. All of these obtainable sub-paths can be connected into a continuous path with proper selection of the start point. By doing this, separated sub-paths are joined with each other to decrease the number of the startup and shutdown process for the extruder, which is beneficial for the enhancement of the deposition quality and the efficiency. Additionally, some methodologies are proposed to further optimize the generated non-retraction paths. At last, several cases are used to test and verify the developed methodology and the comparisons with conventional path filling patterns are conducted. The results show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the retraction motions and is especially beneficial for the high efficient additive manufacturing without compromise on the part resistance.