Customized Slicer SW for Dental Printing Using DLP-based 3D Printing

The Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) announced the development of a customized slicer software, a core technology in 3D printing. The software is optimized for dental printing using DLP 3D printing.

3D printing is a layered process, requiring preliminary work, such as creating supports to support parts that float in midair. Slicer software performs preliminary work, such as rotating the 3D model and placing supports, and generates output data by dividing the 3D model into horizontal layers. This software performs a key function in 3D printing.

Until now, domestic DLP 3D printer manufacturers have been less competitive in price as they have been equipped with general-purpose foreign slicer SW priced at 1.5 to 3 million won. In addition, it was difficult to compete with foreign 3D printers regardless of the excellence of the equipment itself, as it not only caused inconvenience to the dental labs who were the users due to unnecessarily complex functions, but also could not reflect the equipment's unique output know-how, such as fine adjustment of curing time or light amount for each output material.

Considering the reality of the 3D printing equipment industry, KETI has focused on developing customized functions specialized for dental laboratories, such as an automatic placement function for printing multiple teeth simultaneously, a tooth support recommendation function, a rotation function for minimizing post-processing, and a slicing and stacked cross-sectional image generation function, along with a simple UI. It is expected that the domestic production of slicer SW will secure the price competitiveness of 3D printers.

Shin Hwa-seon, a senior researcher at KETI's Intelligent Image Processing Research Center who oversaw the technology development, said, "This slicer SW is based on a slicing engine developed with government support, and by additionally integrating a 3D rendering engine, it is a SW that can be specialized to meet corporate needs in the future," adding, "We plan to continuously add new functions such as automatic support generation in the future."

In addition, he said, “The slicing engine technology developed by KETI can be utilized in various 3D printing fields such as not only dental but also automobiles, aviation, and shipbuilding, and we expect that it will contribute to securing global competitiveness in the 3D printer equipment field for domestic small and medium-sized enterprises.”

The core technology of KETI's '3D printing slicing engine' was developed as a project for 'development of a smart slicer customized for domestic popular 3D printers' supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT, and this dental customized slicer SW was developed as a corporate consignment project of Hephzibah and is currently being bundled with Hephzibah equipment..