Development of a digital twin system for acquiring surface features of solid models in light-curing additive manufacturing

The manufacturing process of light-curing additive manufacturing leads to the inevitable presence of steps on the surface of the produced models, which affects the surface quality of the product. In the context of mass production, evaluating the surface quality of a model requires a large number of experimental samples to obtain data, which leads to material waste and extended production cycles. To facilitate the acquisition of surface feature data of a solid model, a digital twin system is proposed in this study. The system is specifically applied to light-curing additive manufacturing to generate a digital model with the surface features of a solid model. It aims to realize the replacement of the solid model with a virtual model for surface quality inspection. To realize the concept of generating high-fidelity digital models, a digital twin light-curing molding process was designed. It simulates the principle of light-curing molding and generates a digital model containing the surface features of a solid product based on the slice profile data. Case studies are conducted to build a digital twin system for the liquid crystal display light-curing additive manufacturing molding process to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme and the fidelity of the digital model. The results of the comparison test between the digital model and the solid model show that the digital model produced by the digital twin system of the LCD light-curing additive manufacturing molding process contains the key features of the solid model. The digital model serves as the foundational data to verify whether the physical model meets the requirements.