Approximating contact-area of supports in layered manufacturing

This paper considers the problem of approximating the contact-area for non-convex prototypes built via Layered Manufacturing. Specifically , the paper proposes a set of heuristics for choosing candidate build directions along with a criterion to test the quality of each heuristic. The paper also presents efficient algorithms that compute approximately the amount of contact-area for a given build direction. Experi- mental results on real-world models provide a comparison of the proposed heuristics. Layered Manufacturing (LM) is a fast-growing technology that produces high-quality prototypes with added color in a matter of hours and at low cost. Briefly , LM works as fol- lows: The digital description of the prototype is oriented suitably and sliced into horizontal 2D layers, which are then built in succession in the vertical direction. Ideally the proto- type is oriented so that it is self-supporting during the build phase. However, real-world objects usually do not admit a