Research On The Slicing Algorithm And Its Realiation Based On AMF

Additive Manufacturing is a kind of multidisciplinary manufacturing technology developed in the past 30 years,which has overcome the limitation of complex geometric shapes.It has characteristics of multi-material,multi-level and composite function manufacturing.So it has become a hot research in the world and its application field is expanding.In order to full use of the unique advantages of AM,the United States Additive Manufacturing Standardization Committee F42 proposed a new generation of standard data file format AMF.However,the current AM devices do not support the application of the file format.So AMF and its slicing technology were studied in this paper,and the printing application of the file format was discussed.Slicing technology was an essential step in the AM process,and also the center of the whole model data process.In this paper,a new algorithm using optimized geometric topology information and based on the original slicing algorithm of STL model to process the AMF was presented.First,Microsoft MSXML4 was used to read the vertices,mesh and volumes of AMF file,and topology information was established according to the AMF file structure.Then,all the triangle facets were traversed,the slicing planes were determined by minimum and maximum values of each triangle's Z coordinate and slicing precision.At last,according to adjacency relationship of the triangles,the closed contour was obtained by connecting all the points of intersection.Then,the slicing software was developed based on the Visual C++ 6.0 environment.Adopting the idea of modularization,the whole software was established by top-down and step-by-step decomposition means in this paper.The display framework was completed with the application of MFC,and the display output of loaded AMF model data was reconstructed by openGL technology.Finally,the slicing algorithm and software were tested.The printing experiment and printing precision test of the AMF file including two kinds of materials were finished.The experimental results show that the slicing software developed in this paper could process the AMF file model quickly and realize multi-material print of AMF.The error of the measured size and design size of the part was low,so the experiment validated the accuracy and effectiveness of the slicing algorithm and software.