The Design Of Control And Drive System For The Print Head Used In Powder Bonded3D Printer

Powder bonded3D printer is a mainstream technology in rapid prototyping field and hasbeen developed rapidly and applied extensively. Since print head is a critical component, thedrive and motion control system for it is key to the research and development of powderbonded3D printer. The appearance and development of SOPC based on FPGA provides aconvenient and reliable solution.The powder bonded3D printer’s fundamental has been researched in this paper in thefirst place. According to the3D printer’s overall framework and technological requirementsthe print head and servo motor has been selected. Because of the high repeated positioningprecision of print head, a design that using encoder pulses as the trig signal of print head wasproposed. As a result of the strict time-control requirement and high signal frequency of printhead, a FPGA chip based Nios was chosen as the core controller for its concurrency withhardware circuit. After that the control panel and relevant circuits was been designed.The rotary structure with interrupt was selected in accordance with the degree of3Dprinter’s control to the external responsiveness. System main function was designed accordingto the structure. Interrupt design and function module partition was completed according with3D printer’s overall frame. After that the configuration of Nios soft-core processor wasfinished. Underlying drivers and peripheral logic modules for serial port communication, printcontrol, motor control function modules was designed respectively. These functions ofperipheral logic modules have been simulated in Modelsim at last.Experiments show that accurate and reliable control signal timing of print head has beengenerated and the injection point position is accurate and identical.3D printer can print withthe transmitted data layer-by-layer. Some expected3DP samples were acquired which the3Dprinter has some application value and reference significance.