PRE-PROCESSING OF ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING INPUT FILES FOR NUMERICAL SIMULATION

Abstract

In this contribution, we present the concept of a 3D printer software emulator facilitating the creation of a spatial finite element mesh suitable for the printing process simulation. The concept is based on gradual processing of a native 3D printer input file (in a G-code format). This file contains a complete description of manufacturing process consisting of series of individual commands interpreted by a printer. The effect of each command needs to be precisely evaluated to obtain the position of the printer head and the volume of the deposited material in any given time. The calculation is performed in the same way as in the Marlin printer firmware using the trapezoidal motion curves and a command buffer. To represent a computational model, a discrete voxel model with variable edge length and time discretization is used. The volume of deposited material is calculated for each voxel as a function of time. The resulting model is suitable for numerical analysis of the printing process.