A Reverse Compensation Framework for Shape Deformation Control in Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Shape deformation is a well-known problem in additive manufacturing (AM). For example, in the stereolithography (SL) process, some of the factors that lead to part deformation including volumetric shrinkage, thermal cooling, added supporting structures, and the layer-by-layer building process. Variant sources of deformation and their interactions make it difficult to predict and control the shape deformation to achieve high accuracy that is comparable to numerically controlled machining. In this paper, a computational framework based on a general reverse compensation approach is presented to reduce the shape deformation in AM processes. In the reverse compensation process, the shape deformation is first calculated by physical measurements. A novel method to capture the physical deformation by finding the optimal correspondence between the deformed shape and the given nominal model is presented. The amount of compensation is determined by a compensation profile that is established based on nominal and offset models. The compensated digital model can be rebuilt using the same building process for a part with significantly less part deformation than the built part related to the nominal model. Two test cases have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented computational framework. There is a 40–60% improvement in terms of L2- and L∞-norm measurements on geometric errors.