3D printed parts now match digital designs more closely with new modeling technique

People are Increasingly Turning to Software to Design Complex Material Structures Like AirPlane Wings and Medical Implants. But as design models become more capable, our fabrication technique haven’t kept up. Even 3D printers Struggle to Reelibly Produce The Precise Designs Created by Algorithms. The problem has been to a disconnect between the ways a material is expected to perform and how it actually work.

Now, Mit Researchers have created a way for models to account for 3D printing’s limitations during the design process. In Experiences, they showed their approach could be used to make materials that performance much more closely to the way they’re intended to.

“If you do’t account for these limitations, Printers can Either Over- Or Under-DePosit Material by Quite A Lot, So Your PART BECOUSES HeAR or Lighter Than Intended. Undrestimate The Material Performance Significantly, “Says gilbert w. W. W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Josephine Carsensen. “With our technique, you know what you geting in terms of performance because the numerical model and experimental results align very well.”

The approach is described in the journey Materials & DesignIn an open-access paper co-authored by carsen and ph.d. Student Hajin Kim-Tackowiak.

Matching theory with reality

Over the last decade, new design and fabrication technologies have transformed the way things are made, especially in Industries Like aerospace, Automotive, Automotive, and Biomedical Employment Reach Precise Weight-to-STRENGTH RATIOS and Other Performance Thresholds. In Particular, 3D Printing Allows Materials to be made with more complex internal structures.

“3D printing processes generally given us more flexibility because we don’t have to come up with forms or molds for things that would be made more tradinal means the more traditional means” Kim-tackowiak explains.

As 3D printing has made production more precise, so have methods for designing complex material structures. One of the most advanced computational design techniques is knowledge as topology optimization. Topology optimization has been used to generate new and often surprising material structures that can outperform conventional designs, in some cases approaching theoretical limits of certain Thresholds. It is currently being used to design materials with optimized stiffness and strength, maximized energy absorption, fluid permeability, and more.

But Topology optimization often creates designs at extremly fin scales that 3D printers have struggled to reliably reproduce. The problem is the size of the print head that extrudes the material. If the design specifies a layer to be 0.5 Milimiters Thick, For Instruction, and the Print Head is only capable of extruding 1-milimeter-hick layers, the final design will be warmed and IMPRECISEE.

Another Problem has to do with the way 3D Printers Create Parts, with a print head extruding a thin bead of material as it glides access the printing area, gradually Building Parts Layer by Layer. That can cause weak bonding between layers, making the part more prone to separation or failure.

The researchers sought to address the disconnect between expected and actual properties of materials that arise from that limitation.

“We Thought,” We know these limitations in the beginning, and the field has gotten better at quantifying these limitation, so we might as well design from the get-going in mind, “kim-tact in money.

In Previous Work, Carstensen Developed an algorithm that embedded information about the print nozzle size into design algorithms for beam structures. For this paper, The Researchers Built Off that Approach to Incorporate the Direction of the print head and the corresponding impact of weak bonding between layers. They also made it work with more complex, porous structures that can have extramely elastic properties.

The Approach Allows Users to Add Variables to the Design Algorithms that account for the center of the bead being extrauded from a print head and the exact location of the weaker Bonding Region Betweene Layers. The approach also automatically dictates the path the print head should take action production.

The researchers used their technique to create a series of reepeting 2D designs with varieties sizes of holow pores, or densites. They Compared Theose Creations to Materials Made Using Traditional Topology Optimization designs of the same densities.

In Tests, The Traditionally Designed Materials Deviated from Their Intended Mechanical Performance More Than Materials Designed Using The Researchers’ New Technique At Material densrities 70%. The researchers also found that Conventional Designs Consistent Over-Deeposated Material during Fabrication. Overall, The Researchers’ Approach LED to Parts with more reliable performance at most densities.

“One of the challenges of topology optimization has been that you need a lot of expertise to get good results, so that Once you take the designs off the computer, the matheraals behave the mathe Carsstencence Says. “We’re trying to make it easy to get these high-right products.”

Scaling a new design approach

The researchers believe this is the first time a design technique has across for bot the print head size and weak bonding between layers.

“When you design something, you should use as much context as possible,” Kim-tackowiak says. “It was rewarding to Into these designs, it’s nice to see we can correlate what comes out of the computer with what comes out of the production process. “

In Future Work, The Researchers Hope to improve their method for Higher Material densities and for different kinds of materiels like cement and Ceramics. Still, they said their approach offered an improvement over existing techniques, which often require experienced 3D printing specialists to help account for the Limitations and Materials.

“It was cool to see that just by putting in the size of your deposit and the bonding property values, you get designs that would have required the consultation of somebody who ‘ Kim-tackowiak says.

The researchers say the work Paves the way to design with more materials.

“We’d like to see this enable the use of materials that people have disregarded beCause printing with them has led to issues,” kim-tackowiak says. “Now we can leverage those properties or work with that those quirks as opposed to just not using all the material options we have at our disposal.”

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