The Study of On-Line Waste Material Removal Procedures for Bridge Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM) Process

Focusing on the drawbacks inhered in the laminated object manufacturing (LOM), a new Bridge-LOM process and its associated building algorithm are proposed in this paper. The proposed Bridge-LOM process starts with the construction of the bridge structures to link a stack of 2-D geometry contours to the outer frame based on the proposed bridge building algorithm. Afterwards, laser is directed to cut along the contours, and then the upper pressing head is pushed down and the layers are bonded. This is followed by spraying some adhesive on the top of bonded layers. The procedures of cutting, bonding and adhesive spraying are repeated until the complete 3D part is produced. From the experiments, it is verified that the proposed Bridge-LOM process not only saves laser-cutting time, the time on waste material removal is also reduced significantly by more than 80%. Furthermore, the hollow bottle can even be fabricated.