Polyhedral Voronoi diagrams for additive manufacturing
Résumé
A critical advantage of additive manufacturing is its ability to fabricate complex small-scale structures. These microstructures can be understood as a metamaterial: they exist at a much smaller scale than the volume they fill, and are collectively responsible for an average elastic behavior different from that of the base printing material making the fabricated object lighter and/or flexible along specific directions. In addition, the average behavior can be graded spatially by progressively modifying the microstructure geometry. The definition of a microstructure is a careful trade-off between the geometric requirements of manufacturing and the properties one seeks to obtain within a shape: in our case a wide range of elastic behaviors. As geometric requirements become stricter, it becomes increasingly difficult to design microstructures. This explains why most existing microstructures target stereolithography (SLA) and laser sintering (SLS) processes where requirements, while strict, are still more relaxed than that of continuous deposition systems such as fused filament fabrication (FFF). In this work we introduce a novel type of microstructures that strictly enforce all the requirements of FFF-like processes: continuity, support and overhang angles. They offer a wide range of orthotropic elastic responses that can be freely graded spatially. This allows to fabricate parts usually reserved to the most advanced technologies on widely available inexpensive printers that also benefit from a continuously expanding range of materials.
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