Design and Fabrication of a General Purpose 3D Digitizer Based on Grinding Technique

The objective of this research is to design and fabricate a general purpose 3D digitizer based on grinding technique to completely acquire the geometry of an object, including its inner structure, and accurately create its CAD model. How the 3D digitizer works is as follows. First a thin layer of an object that is fixed in epoxy is removed by a grinder and the image of the cross section is taken by a CCD camera. The process is repeated until the images of all the cross sections of the object are captured. Then the images are stacked up by using software 3D-DOCTOR to obtain the 3D CAD model. The accuracy of the 3D digitizer developed in the research was within 0.03 mm when measuring a length of 5.50 mm and the gauge R&R percentage was 25.99%. The performance shows that the 3D digitizer is promising for use in industry.