Supportless Cylindrical Printing of Rotating Components with Overhangs on a Rotary FDM 3D Printer

In Additive Manufacturing (AM), the need for curved layer path planning and printing has emerged as a significant advancement beyond 2.5D printing, particularly for rotating components with overhang structures like propellers that require supports. However, existing slicing methods for cylindrical surfaces, both direct and parametrised, fall short of meeting the diverse filling pattern requirements of general rotating components, creating a process planning gap. Moreover, existing mapping-based process planning research primarily centres around metal printing utilising costly printing equipment, including robots or printers with more than four axes, rather than the affordable Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an innovative surface-plane mapping-based cylindrical slicing strategy that utilises a triangle mesh model. This approach overcomes the limitations of costly equipment by leveraging low-cost three-axis FDM 3D printers with a rotary build platform. The proposed technique can generate cylindrical paths of various patterns such as line-arc-line, helix, circle-line-circle, and contours and offers the potential for supportless printing of rotating components with overhangs, which is not achievable with traditional bottom-up printing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the cylindrical slicing method for printing propellers with different patterns. The findings provide process designers with an innovative slicing and supportless printing approach for rotating components with overhangs on a rotary economical 3D printer with three-axis, enabling improved geometric accuracy, reduced material waste, and enhanced mechanical performance in AM.