GMA additive manufacturing of large propeller based on curved layer

In order to realize high-precision and high-efficiency additive manufacturing of parts which have complex curved surfaces, a highly adaptive curved layering algorithm is developed in this paper. The strategy of translating the triangular mesh control points from the space angle weighted normal direction has used to generate the surface cluster which is equidistant from the initial layer, and the slice contour of each layer is obtained by intersection operation between the surface cluster and the model. On this basis, the isometric contour offset path on the curved layer is obtained by using the surface equidistant path planning algorithm based on the idea of voxelization and surface integration, which ensured the forming accuracy. Six axis robot and rotary displacement machine are used as the motion mechanism. Finally, a 1 m diameter torsional prismatic propeller is actually deposited on a cylindrical metal pipe with an outer diameter of 0.2 m by using gas metal arc (GMA) curved layer additive manufacturing method. After scanning detection and model comparison, the calculated standard deviation of blade forming dimension is 1.1 mm, and the maximum deviation is less than 3.0 mm.The results show that curved layering algorithm can improve the forming efficiency and surface quality for the additive manufacturing of parts with specific surface parts such as propellers.