STL-free design and manufacturing paradigm for high-precision powder bed fusion

Abstract

Abstract High-precision powder bed fusion (PBF), together with highly complex geometries necessitate a much more scalable representation of the geometry and an efficient computational pipeline. This paper presents a new digital design and manufacturing paradigm to solve the scalability and efficiency challenges by using the concept of STL-free workflow. It seamlessly integrates implicit solid modelling for design and direct slicing for manufacturing without any intermediate steps related to STL meshes. The presented paradigm has been validated by two case studies involving complex geometries filled with multiscale triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS), which are fabricated by PBF with laser beam size 25\u202fµm.