In additive manufacturing (AM), slicing is a crucial step in process planning to convert a computer-aided design (CAD) model to a machine-specific format. Digital light processing (DLP) printing is an important AM process that has a good surface finish, high accuracy, and fabrication speed and is widely applied in many dental and engineering industries. However, as DLP uses images for fabrication different from other toolpath-based processes, its process planning is understudied. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to study and compare the slicing technologies for DLP printing. Three slicing technologies are compared: contour, voxelization, and ray-tracing.

Issue Section:
Technical Brief
Topics:
Additive manufacturing, Computation, Printing, Ray tracing, Computer-aided design, Manufacturing, Manifolds, Production planning

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