A study of geometric shape of polygons for additive manufacturing

In recent years, 3D data becomes very popular and highly-qualified 3D printers are available with low costs. This enables a lot of people to use laminate modeling devices. In this present condition, however, few techniques have been established to evaluate the quality of the objects output by laminate modeling devices. This paper thus studies how 3D data in such devices affects the quality of printed objects and examines a technique to optimize input data. As the first step to achieve this purpose, we focus on triangular polygon shapes as 3D input data and examine the effect to the quality of printed objects. This paper examines how triangulation pattern change affects 3D model shapes, without changing the location of vertices. In this study, 3D measured point clouds are used. All triangulation patterns are defined by using the same vertices. When a pattern is generated, triangular faces are aligned so that they do not overlap. The polygons generated from each pattern are evaluated. The surface areas of triangles in each pattern and the length of edges are compared and the total surface areas of whole shapes are examined.