Comparing Slicing Technologies for Digital Light Processing Printing

Abstract

In additive manufacturing (AM), slicing is a crucial step in process planning to convert a computer-aided design (CAD) model to a machine-specific format. Digital light processing (DLP) printing is an important AM process that has a good surface finish, high accuracy, and fabrication speed and is widely applied in many dental and engineering industries. However, as DLP uses images for fabrication different from other toolpath-based processes, its process planning is understudied. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to study and compare the slicing technologies for DLP printing. Three slicing technologies are compared: contour, voxelization, and ray-tracing.