Octree reinforced thin shell objects rapid prototyping by fused deposition modelling

Rapid prototyping has gained wide industrial acceptance in recent years. Its main advantage is that it improves the "time to market" and the design quality of a product. Most rapid prototyping processes have to build the solid volume layer by layer. The tracing of the cross-sectional area in each layer is the most time-consuming step. The process can be speeded up if the material volume to be traced can be reduced by extracting some empty volumes in the original solid. However, the hollow solid generated by employing the negative solid offset technique is subject to the problem of no interior support. In this paper, a sub-boundary octree approach of generating thin shell solids with reinforced interior structuring is proposed. The procedures to generate a reinforced thin shell solid are studied. Various testing models are produced by a fused deposition modelling rapid prototyper and the results are supportive.