Evaluation of CAD and Slicer Software Combination in Modeling Additive Manufactured Geometries in Fused Deposition Modeling

ABSTRACT The advancements in additive manufacturing technologies have revolutionized the manufacturing industry in recent years, enabling unprecedented design flexibility and also simultaneously accelerating the production time of individual components. The differences in the pre‐processing phase have been argued to have a significant influence on the production quality of the 3D‐printed part. Moreover, the interface between the CAD software and the slicing software is decisive for the quality of the generated G‐code, which is used in 3D printing. This work aims to evaluate multiple commercial and open‐source CAD platforms and review their functionality in designing 3D models and their inherent complexities for additive manufacturing by FDM. A specimen design was modeled using multiple commercial and open‐source CAD platforms in combination with slicer software. The G‐codes for the selected software platforms were generated and analyzed to evaluate the accuracy and flexibility in designing amongst the selected CAD platforms in combination with the slicer software. From the study, significant insights were gained about the relative strengths of the individual CAD and slicer combinations and also their inherent drawbacks. This data was used to evaluate the combinations in terms of the accuracy and design flexibility of each of these combinations. Such an analysis of the aforementioned software tools can provide significant insights into the optimization of the additive manufacturing process and contribute towards the efficient conversion of 3D designs into functional parts. Furthermore, this comparison and evaluation of the CAD software can play a crucial role in both visualizing and realizing the additive manufacturing process.