Process Feasibility for Additive Manufacturing
The main process of each routing (Printing, Laser Sintering, Metal Sintering, or Resin Curing) is subject to the following material constraint and minimum layer thickness constraint:
• Current material’s Process property is set to the current process:
o For Printing, the material’s Process property is 3D Printing.
o For Laser Sintering, the material’s Process property is SLS.
o For Metal Sintering, the material’s Process property is DMLS.
o For Resin Curing, the material’s Process property is SLA.
• If the setup option Minimum Layer Thickness Check is set to true (it is false by default), the part can be built with the minimum layer thickness for the current process, as given by the lookup table tblLayerThickness.
The cost model determines that the part cannot be built with a given layer thickness if the difference between the heights of some pair of surfaces is less than the given thickness. (aPriori determines the height of a given surface by considering the Is Accessible From relation between that surface and a setup axis that is co-directional with the build direction. The Tool Reach property of this relation gives an indication of the height; Tool Reach is smaller for higher surfaces.)
In the illustrations below, the pairs of parallel red lines indicate the difference between the heights of various pairs of planar faces.