The Heterogeneous Compensation for the Infiltrative Error of the Binder Jetting Additive Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

In binder jetting additive manufacturing, such as Three Dimensional Printing (3DP) and Patternless Casting Manufacturing (PCM, a process similar as ExOne and VoxelJet), the building error is mainly caused by the infiltration by the binder in the powder bed, and appear heterogeneous magnitude along different orientations because of the different infiltrating depth of the printed binder between the building direction and the binder printing direction. Current methods to compensating these error are mostly based on the contour equidistant offset and the model shrinkage, which couldn’t deal with the heterogeneous infiltrative error. In this paper, we will propose a novel compensation method, in which the STL model will be counteracted heterogeneously in different directions to compensate the heterogeneous infiltrative distances of the binder in the powder. By this method, a sphere STL model will be transferred into an ellipsoid with variant axis length along different X/Y/Z directions. The method could greatly improve the dimensional accuracy of a series of additive manufacturing techniques which are based on the binder jetting onto powder bed.Mechanical Engineerin