OCTREE REINFORCED THIN SHELL OBJECTS RAPID PROTOTYPING BY FUSED DEPOSITION MODELING

Rapid prototyping has gained wide industrial acceptance in recent year s. Its main advantage is that it improves the ''time to market'' and t he design quality of a product. Most rapid prototyping processes have to build the solid volume layer by layer. The tracing of the cross-sec tional area in each layer is the most time-consuming step. The process can be speeded up if the material volume to be traced can be reduced by extracting some empty volumes to be traced can be reduced by extrac ting some empty volumes in the original solid. However, the hollow sol id generated by employing the negative solid offset technique is subje ct to the problem of no interior support. In this paper, a sub-boundar y octree approach of generating thin shell solids with reinforced inte rior structuring is proposed. The procedures to generate a reinforced thin shell solid are studied. Various testing models are produced by a fused deposition modelling rapid prototyper and the results are suppo rtive.