Build Orientation Determination for Multi-material Deposition Additive Manufacturing with Continuous Fibers

Build orientation of a part in Additive Manufacturing (AM) has complex effect on part's quality, process planning, post-processing, processing time and cost, etc. The identification of the optimal build orientation for a part is one of the main contents of process planning in AM. In this paper, a build orientation optimization strategy is developed for a new AM process, multi-material deposition with continuous fibers, to improve the part quality while reducing the production time & cost. First, a set of finite alternative build orientations are generated by using surface shape feature with associated rules derived from the specific characteristics and constraints of the new developing AM process; then, a multi-attribute decision making algorithm is applied to determine the optimal orientation according to preset preferences. A case study is presented for demonstration. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.