Research and Optimization of the Three-Dimensional Printing Unloading Process for the Flexible Support Platform

At present, a three-dimensional (3D) printing model is unloaded from the working platform manually, which hinders the automation of 3D printing. In this article, a new type of 3D printing auxiliary equipment called flexible support platform is designed to achieve automatic unloading. Unloading problems, especially its principle and influencing factors, are investigated in detail. We also study the build orientation optimization to find the optimum solution for unloading. The improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is applied to avoid falling into local optimum. Furthermore, we combine optimization for unloading with our previous work, which is in terms of support structure reduction. The unloading condition has been transformed into the calculation of added support structure owning to the process improvement, so that the optimized model with minimum support structure can be unloaded successfully. In a word, this article fulfills the need of 3D printing unloading research and achieves efficient automatic unloading.