Abstract
Additive manufacturing continues to change many aspects of the manufacturing industry. Although widely implemented in industry for the design and prototype stages of product development, printing speed is the critical factor that prevents the technology from being implemented in medium and large-scale production environments. Recent work developed a novel algorithm using greedy search to reduce extrusionless travel and thus reduces the total print time. The greedy algorithm reorders contour deposition between the slicing and printing processes. The impacts of this reordering of printed line segments is expected to impact mechanical properties in the fabricated parts by affecting the cooling time between layers in different regions differentially. This work evaluates the effect of these toolpath changes on the mechanical properties of 3D printed parts. The new toolpath is compared to a standard toolpath generated from Cura. Of keen interest in additive manufacturing is that of lattice structures for lightweight and strength optimized components. We test three lattice structures under default and improved deposition plans using the same hardware and material. In a lattice structure, defects in individual lattices has a more pronouced impact on macrostructural properties, thus the mechanical properties of lattices fabricated using this local search ordering is tested. We find the local search algorithm, in addition to generating up to 21% quicker prints with 66% less wasted motion, also increases absorbed energy in compression for some structures and has little or no impact on peak force.
