ROMI 3D Printing Simulator - PowerPoint Presentation

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ROMI3D Printing Simulator

Submitted by:

Etay Barzilay

Under the guidance of:

Prof. Jihad El-

sana

Department of computer science

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

In cooperation with

Stratasys, Ltd.

The Problems in the 3D printing industry

Takes a long time to print a model.

Hard to schedule time for receiving a printer. Hard to spot tiny mistakes and determined where did they come from.

Not possible to print only specific part of a model.

Almost impossible to test undeveloped features due to the strictness of machines parameters.

Today, in the 3D printing industry, in order to test a developed feature we have to print an actual model.

The Solution

Processing one slice takes 2-3 seconds.

Infinite amount of simulators. Data mistakes are spotted easily.

Can simulating printing for partial models.

Encourage innovation – all parameters are configurable.

A fast, accurate, generic 3D printing

that deals

with different kinds of materials and model’s geometries and has diverse abilities and possibilities to detect whether the model’s data was processed correctly or not.

Basic concepts

NozzleA nozzle is the hole the drop of material comes out of.Multiple nozzles composes one printing head.

In the picture, the red line divided to the nozzles.

Printing unit concepts

Basic concepts

Printing headA printing head

is a collection of nozzles arrange in Y axis.Multiple printing heads composes one printing block.In the picture, the entire red line is the printing head. 

Printing block:

A printing block is the complete unit responsible for dropping all drops and holds all the printing heads together.

Some printers may have more than one printing block.In the picture, the printing block is the entire picture besides the green transparent tray.

Printing unit concepts

Basic concepts

Single fire dataAn information bit for each nozzle in the entire block determine whether to shoot a drop in a certain static moment or not.

Travel A single move of the printing block across all X-axis of a model.

A collection of fires composes one travel.

Printing data concepts

Basic concepts

Pass: A specified number of travels according to required printing quality. The travels occur in small movements on Y-Axis in order to give the required resolution on Y-Axis. 

Slice: A printed slice is composed by a specified number of passes, determined by the printing head’s Y-axis size, the model size and the tray size. Model: a printed model is composed by a certain number of printed slices in Z-axis.

Printing data concepts

Input and Output

Fires-data files – each hex file will contain binary information on one travel and all its fires-data according to motor steps on X axis

.

Two configuration files: General parameters and Slices information files which will be explain extendedly below.

Input

Input and Output

Output

2D slices pictures which reflects in the highest accuracy each drop of material

.

A 3D-model file that gives a close resemblance of the physical model.

Examples

One slice of a Hexagon

, was very important in order to check perfect accuracy.

I wanted to see if the triangles that compose the hexagon will be completely full, that the pixels will be exactly where they should and that the hexagon will be printing in the exact location on the tray as I defined.

Moreover, I tested whether the entire block can print using different materials all together in perfect synchronization so each color will be printed exactly where it should.

The result is a total success. The triangles that compose the hexagon are completely full with no pixels gone out of range, the synchronization between the heads also went as expected without color overlaps.

Examples

One slice of a woman portrait, using one color.This test was a level jump with the complexity of the slice.Printing a human portrait is a hard thing to do.

The background is black and I chose light yellow to be the head color, it is possible to see that the pixels composing the face are with no spaces what so ever.

Examples

Data shift example. This example may be the most important of them all.The main problem in most of data processing algorithms is data shifts.Data shifts can cause: rough walls, holes inside the models and other problems.

In the physical model, due to the fact data shifts occur mostly in a very small distances, it is very hard to locate their exact location, but using the simulator we can print only a small range of slices and determine the exact location of the data shift.This example has 15 slices of a cube. Three of them has data shift of 5 pixels (~0.2 mm) in X axis and 1 pixel (~0.04 mm) in y axis.

You can clearly see the data shift in the result!

Examples

CylindersA complete 3D cylinders model.The model was build using “Inflated model” presentation form

which basically means, it will build one slice, inflate it by appropriate ratio according to the sampling rate, then it will build another one and so on…Between the duplicated slices (i.e. the inflation of one slice) faces will be constructed automatically. Also in inflated model form, the sampling slices rate can be set.

Features and Abilities

Printing only a certain range of slices and creating a partial 3D model out of them.

Fast simulating. Supports different colors and materials

.

Encourage innovative ideas due to the possibility to Configure strict parameters such as “physical distance between heads”, ”Number of heads”, etc…

Two forms of 3D modeling.

Easy to support future machines.

Easy to test the data even before the physical machine was created.

Significant challenges

Pre-study the printer way of work

Generalization

Improve time

complexity

Handling a large amount of memory

3D

Modeling

Creating Z-faces without any data given