Fused deposition modelling (FDM) is well-known as an inexpensive and the most commonly used additive manufacturing process. In FDM, build orientation is one of the critical factors that affect the quality of the printed part. However, the activity of determining a build orientation for an FDM part, i.e., part orientation for FDM, usually relies on the knowledge and experience of domain experts. This necessitates an approach that enables the capture, representation, reasoning, and reuse of the data and knowledge in this activity. In this paper, a description logic (DL) ontology-supported part orientation approach for FDM is presented. Firstly, a set of top-level entities are created to construct a DL ontology for FDM part orientation. Then a DL ontology-supported alternative orientation generation procedure, a DL ontology-supported factor value prediction procedure, and a DL ontology-supported optimal orientation selection procedure are developed successively. After that, the application of the presented approach is illustrated via part orientation on six FDM parts. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented approach are demonstrated through theoretical predictions and printing experiments and the advantages of the approach are demonstrated via an example. The demonstration results suggest that the presented approach has satisfying effectiveness and efficiency and provides a semantic enrichment model for capturing and representing FDM part orientation data and knowledge to enable automatic checking, reasoning, query, and further reuse.

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