A Process Planning Applicative for Rapid Prototyping Technology

In general, a software for Rapid Prototyping (RP) has to read the part geometry in STL (STereoLithography) format, slice it electronically, generate information for layer addition and send these data to the RP machine. This work presents the development of a RP software to achieve that. The main objectives are to obtain autonomy on the processing parameters and to develop a system which could be used in different RP technologies. In this way, the proposed software treats the initial stages of the process, which are common to the majority of the RP technologies, in a generic way and the peculiarities of each one are addressed individually. Today, the system can already deal with the initial stages of the RP process for relatively complex geometries and was implemented for the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology. Some difficulties are reported and the system feasibility is demonstrated with the good results obtained in some case studies.