Toolpath Generation for Additive Manufacturing Using CNC Milling Machine

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) systems have gained popularity, due to their capability of producing parts in layer-by-layer manner with any degree of complexity. Although in the last three decades, various commercial AM systems have been developed, however, high cost of the indigenous materials used in commercial machines is the major hindrance for wide applications. Therefore, an economically viable system needs to be developed by exploring the existing manufacturing systems, i.e., CNC milling, etc., as AM technique. To perform AM operation on CNC milling machine, a toolpath is to be required which could be traced by the deposition tool to fabricate the part by adding material in layer-by-layer fashion. In this regard, the present paper proposes a raster and perimeter based toolpath for performing additive manufacturing on existing CNC milling machine. MATLAB platform has been used for algorithm implementation and development of toolpath. Graphical User Interface (GUI) has also been developed in MATLAB to provide the easy access of all parameters related to the toolpath generation, i.e., road gap, slice height, number of contours, etc. To check the feasibility of developed toolpath, experiments have been conducted on existing milling machine by developing and mounting a customized material deposition tool. 3D parts have been fabricated successfully using the developed toolpath. Results show that developed toolpath can be used for performing AM on CNC milling machine.