Section: New Results

Microstructures for additive manufacturing

• Participants: Jonas Martinez, Sylvain Lefebvre

Nowadays, there is a big interest in the functional optimization of microstructures for additive manufacturing, as reflected by the high number of recent publications on the subject. This also comes not only from research but also industry, as controlling the macroscopic elasticity of materials has a wide range of industrial applications. For instance, to fabricate flexible prosthetic body parts, or to produce rigid but porous prosthetics for surgery. In particular, controlling material elasticity will enable the design of lightweight and resistant materials, and in turn, reduce material consumption.

Most of the existing software either optimize for periodic tilings of microstructures, or generate random microstructures without precise control of their functionality. We recently introduced a method [7] to generate stochastic structures (figure 4) while having unique computational advantages, and precisely controlling their functionality. Our optimization approach of stochastic porous structures deviates significantly from both the periodic tiling of microstructures and the optimization of macrostructures, by making a link between microstructures, and procedural solid textures with controlled statistics in Computer Graphics. We believe there are many other such structures left to be discovered, and hope our work will spark further interest in procedurally generated, stochastic microstructures.

Figure 4. Anisotric microstructures