Effect of Adaptive Slicing on Surface Integrity in Additive Manufacturing

In today’s Additive Manufacturing (AM), a part is typically manufactured using layer by layer addition of material from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model. Traditionally the CAD model is transferred to RP system after exchanging to Stereo Lithography (STL) format which is triangulated tessellation of the CAD model. Then it is sliced using different slice algorithms and machine constraints. The inherent uncertainties in this process have led to development of adaptive direct slicing technique. There are several adaptive slicing techniques but only few researches have been done to calculate an actual surface error factor and the cost aspect of the slicing algorithm. This paper proposes new adaptive algorithm to compute a surface error factor and to find the cost effective approach for slicing. The adaptive slicing algorithm dynamically calculates slice thickness and it is based on the allowable threshold for surface integrity error to optimize the cost and time. The paper also provides comparative study of previously developed adaptive models by the authors based on cusp height and surface integrity.