In-process 3D geometry reconstruction of objects produced by direct light projection

Additive manufacturing allows close-to unrestrained geometrical freedom in part design. The ability to manufacture geometries of such complexity is however limited by the difficulty of verifying the tolerances of these parts. Tolerances of features that are inaccessible with traditional measuring equipment such as coordinate measuring machines cannot be verified easily. This problem is addressed by developing an in-line reverse engineering and 3D reconstruction method that allows a true-to-scale reconstruction of a part being additively manufactured. In earlier works (Pedersen et al. 2010 ; Hansen et al. 2011 ), this method has shown its potential with 3D printing (3DP) and selective laser sintering additive manufacturing processes, where it is possible to directly capture the geometrical features of each individual layer during a build job using a digital camera. When considering the process of direct light projection (DLP), the possibility of directly capturing the geometrical features of the object during a build job is limited by the specific machine design and the fact that photoactivated monomers often do not change optical characteristics in the polymerization process. Therefore, a variant of the previously tested and verified method has been implemented on DLP machine, where instead of capturing the geometrical features of the produced objects during the build job directly, these features are captured indirectly by capturing the reflection of the projected light projected during the build job. Test series were made, and a reconstruction of two octave spheres were produced and compared with the input CAD file and scans of the produced objects. The comparison showed a good correlation between the reconstructions and the scans considering the resolution of the images used for the reconstruction, and it was thereby concluded that the method has a promising potential as a verification method for DLP machines.