The development of a CAD environment to determine the preferred build-up direction for layered manufacturing

Stereolithography is a process used to produce polymer components rapidly directly from a computer representation of the part. There are several factors to be considered in order to make efficient use of the process. In particular, the build-up orientation of the part critically affects the part accuracy, the total build time and the volume of the support structures. The purpose of this study is to determine the optimal build-up part orientation for the StereoLithography Apparatus (SLA) process to improve part accuracy, and minimise the total build time and the volume of the support structure. Additionally, an algorithm is developed to calculate the staircase area, quantifying the process errors by the volume of materials supposed to be removed or added to the part, and the optimal layer thickness for the SLA system which can handle the variable layer thickness. Thus, the optimal part orientation is determined based on the user's selections of primary criteria and the optimal thickness of layers is calculated for any part orientation.