Development of a nurbs based adaptive slicing procedure for fused deposition modeling in rapid prototyping applications

Introducing new products at ever increasing rates is important for remaining successful in a competitive global economy; decreasing product development cycle times and increasing product complexity require new ways to take in novel ideas. During the last decades, a new concept called Rapid Prototyping (RP), Layered Manufacturing (LM) has gained popularity in Turkey and worldwide especially in the area of product development, prototyping and tooling. The goal of Rapid Prototyping (RP) is to be able to quickly fabricate complex-shaped, three-dimensional parts directly from Computer Aided Design (CAD) models.The aim of this study is to fabricate parts with minimum time and high surface quality using direct CAD based uniform and adaptive slicing algorithm in Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) process. As an input, Non Uniform Rational B- Splines (NURBS) based model is used which is transformed from the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES) structure, which all commercially software packages can be saved as a IGES file easily. The user interface is created using Qt Designer and integrated with the CAD package of Unigraphics (UG). NURBS based CAD models were tested for uniform and adaptive slicing algorithms.