Rapid jewelry design and prototype making

Abstract

Rapid prototyping (RP) technology has been widely used in making prototypes for quite a long time. However, in-depth study to fabricate jewelry products with RP is not available. This research deals with the production of jewelry by layered manufacturing technology. The work is mainly divided into two parts. In the first part, the work is focused on slicing process in rapid prototyping of jewelry. A new methodology of direct and adaptive slicing, maximum inscribed slab slicing, is applied to 3D solid jewel ring models to produce maximum inscribed 3D stacked slab models (wax or resin models). Four types of maximum inscribed slicing are introduced: bottom-up vertical slicing, top-down vertical slicing, middle-up vertical slicing and middle-up horizontal slicing. The maximum inscribed slab model will minimize material wastage in post-treatment processes and preserves the symmetric property of the original jewel ring model. In the second part, a new orientation methodology, the maximum visibility building orientation, is applied to jewel ring models to orient jewel ring models properly for layered manufacturing. Maximum visibility direction will first be obtained. Then, the best-building direction is found. The best-building orientation obtained will build the jewel ring model with high aesthetic quality. The building error is also considered. Extended Gaussian image is applied in extracting the orientation information of jewelry model. In conclusion, this research demonstrates some feasible methodologies which are specific to improve layered manufacturing based jewelry production.