Zhang Zhengyu,Hong Jun,Ding Yucheng,Xu Ruijie,Zhang Minghua
(School of Mechanical Engineering,Xi'an Jiaotong University,Xi'an 710049,China)
Abstract:A new hollowing process of a STL model was presented to meet the demands for hollowed prototypes in casting and rapid prototype manufacturing. To eliminate the difficulty in directly three-dimensional £¨3D£© offsetting of a STL model,the hollowing operation is divided into the offsetting along the Z axis and cross-sectional contour offsetting,and it implements the Boolean operations on the polygons made by the offset contours of cross-sectional contours to produce a thin-shell sliced STL model.This hollowing operation is especially suitable to hollow the STL models generated from the parts with free-form surfaces.This method has been verified by practical cases,which have showed that it can obviously reduce prototype's building time and cost,and therefore could be useful in practice£®
Keywords:rapid prototyping;STL model;hollowing