Speeding up 3D Printing Using Multi-Head Slicing Algorithms

The emergence of low-cost 3D printing has catalyzed many new applications in academic, industrial, military, and medical fields. 3D printing has been dubbed a very slow process because its most common underlying printing method, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), is time-consuming due to the limited speed of the extruder. Multiple extruders, working simultaneously, can accelerate the printing process, but there are no extant efficient algorithms with guaranteed efficiency for solving the key challenge: how to schedule the extruders to avoid collisions during the printing operations. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms to meet this challenge. First, we propose slicing algorithms for two extruders, which divide each slicing piece into conflicting areas and non-conflicting areas. The extruders can print the non-conflicting areas simultaneously while a conflicting area has to be printed separately by a single one. Then we extend the method to arbitrary n extruders for which we present a more practical sector based slicing algorithm. Our algorithms can achieve approximately n times efficiency when compared to the time consumed by single-extruder printers. We conduct simulations to verify the algorithms and the results show that our algorithms can significantly reduce the printing time.