Casting with skewed ejection direction

Abstract

Casting is a manufacturing process in which liquid is poured into a cast (mold) that has a cavity with the shape of the object to be manufactured. The liquid then hardens, after which the cast is removed. We address geometric problems concerning the removal of the cast. A cast consists of two parts, one of which retracts in a given direction carrying the object with it. Afterwards, the object will be ejected from the retracted cast part. In this paper we give necessary and sufficient conditions to test the feasibility of the cast part retraction and object ejection, where retraction and ejection directions need not be the same. For polyhedral objects, we show that the test can be performed in O(n(2)log(2)n) time and the cast parts can be constructed within the same time bound. The complexity of the cast parts constructed is worst-case optimal. We also give a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a feasible pair of retraction and ejection directions for a given polyhedral object.