Mass Customization: Reuse of Digital Slicing for Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing, also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, enables production of complex customized shapes without requiring specialized tooling and fixture, and mass customization can then be realized with larger adoption. The slicing procedure is one of the fundamental tasks for 3D printing, and the slicing resolution has to be very high for fine fabrication, especially in the recent developed continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) process. The slicing procedure is then becoming the bottleneck in the prefabrication process, which could take hours for one model. This becomes even more significant in mass customization, where hundreds or thousands of models have to be fabricated. We observe that the customized products are generally in a same homogeneous class of shape with small variation. Our study finds that the slicing information of one model can be reused for other models in the same homogeneous group under a properly defined parameterization. Experimental results show that the reuse of slicing information has a maximum of 50 times speedup, and its utilization is dropped from more than 90% to less than 50% in the prefabrication process.