Microstructures to Control Elasticity in 3D Printing

 

We propose a method for fabricating deformable objects with spatially varying elasticity using 3D printing.

July 27, 2015
ACM SIGGRAPH 2015

 

Authors

Christian Schumacher (Disney Research/ETH Joint PhD)

Bernd Bickel (Disney Research/IST Austria)

Jan Rys (ETH Zurich)

Steve Marschner (Cornell University)

Chiara Daraio (ETH Zurich)

Markus Gross (Disney Research/ETH Zurich)

Microstructures to Control Elasticity in 3D Printing

Abstract

Using a single, relatively stiff printer material, our method designs an assembly of smallscale microstructures that have the effect of a softer material at the object scale, with properties depending on the microstructure used in each part of the object. We build on work in the area of metamaterials, using numerical optimization to design tiled microstructures with desired properties, but with the key difference that our method designs families of related structures that can be interpolated to smoothly vary the material properties over a wide range. To create an object with spatially varying elastic properties, we tile the object’s interior with microstructures drawn from these families, generating a different microstructure for each cell using an efficient algorithm to select compatible structures for neighboring cells. We show results computed for both 2D and 3D objects, validating several 2D and 3D printed structures using standard material tests as well as demonstrating various example applications.

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