A low cost cutter-based paper lamination rapid prototyping system

Paper lamination rapid prototyping technology has an advantage of its low overall cost due to the building materials and the processing principle. To reduce the system and its operating cost further, a cutter-based paper lamination rapid prototyping system is proposed. The cutter set employed is cheap and the cutter can turn its cutting direction automatically so as to simplify the system control. In this paper, the cutting mechanism of the cutter was studied. According to its kinetic characteristics, the motion of the cutter nose was described by a tractrix model, and its trace error can be eliminated by modifying the cutter path. Experimental study on the cutting notch was carried out, and the notch specimens were measured through a high-power microscope VH-8000. According to the analysis of the experimental results, the dimension error caused by the cutting notch was within 3 μm and the roughness average (Ra) was less than 6 μm. Two physical parts have been fabricated on the developed experimental machine, which indicates the proposed system has use value.