Feasible Build Orientations for Self-Supporting Fused Deposition Manufacture: A Novel Approach to Space-Filling Tesselated Geometries

Abstract

Support material is often utilised in additive manufacture to enable geometries that are not otherwise self-supporting. Despite the associated opportunities for innovation, the use of support material also introduces a series of limitations: additional material cost, cost of removal of support material, potential contamination of biocompatible materials, and entrapment of support material within cellular structures. This work presents a strategy for minimising the use of support material by comparing the geometric limits of an additive manufacture process to the build angles that exist within a proposed geometry. This method generates a feasibility map of the feasible build orientations for a proposed geometry with a given process. The method is applied to polyhedra that are suitable for close packing to identify space-filling tessellated structures that can be self-supporting. The integrity of an FDM process is quantified, and using the associated feasibility map, self-supporting polyhedra are manufactured. These polyhedra are integrated with non-trivial geometries to achieve a reduction in consumed material of approximately 50%. Nomenclature