Part orientation fused shape optimization for minimisation of print time and material waste in extrusion-based 3D printing

Support structure generation is a critical requirement in additive manufacturing (AM) to prevent material collapse in overhanging regions. However, it increases print time, material waste, and overall production cost, especially in extrusion-based AM. To mitigate these problems, design engineers often resort to manually finetuning or even redesigning prototype geometry to minimise support structures, which is time-consuming and inefficient. A direct geometric optimisation that preserves locality of shape changes whilst corresponding to the part orientation remains an underdetermined problem.

In this paper, we present a novel alternating optimisation framework that finds the corresponding part geometry and orientation to minimise support structures under minimal geometric deviation. Whilst global-level support structure reduction is realised by the part orientation change, we introduce an efficient energy minimisation-based geometric optimisation framework, which is governed by saliency-aware elementwise projections and a set of manufacturing constraints. The proposed framework is validated through extensive computational and physical printing experiments employing multiple 3D printers and support structure types, on a diverse set of complex models including topologically non-trivial parts such as gyroid structures. Our results show an average reduction of 50 % in support structure print time, 27 % in material usage and 25 % in total print time, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its potential as a paradigm shift in manufacturing-oriented design.