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Section: New Results

A Metamaterial for Fused Filament Fabrication

Participants : Jonàs Martínez Bayona, Samuel Hornus, Sylvain Lefebvre.

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. For instance, this can make 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 (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. A 3D printed shoe sole. Left: Control fields used on the model, density (top), orthotropy strength (middle) and angle (bottom). Right: Printed shoe, top, side and bending. The shoe is printed without any skin to reveal the foam structure.
IMG/shoe.jpg

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. Most existing microstructures are designed for stereolithography (SLA) and laser sintering (SLS) processes. The requirements are however different than those of continuous deposition systems such as fused filament fabrication, for which there was a lack of microstructures enabling graded elastic behaviors.

We introduced a novel type of metamaterial that strictly enforces all the requirements of Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF): continuity, self-support and overhang angles. This metamaterial offers a range of orthotropic elastic responses that can be graded spatially. This allows us 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.

This work was presented at the SIGGRAPH conference and published in ACM Transactions on Graphics [12], and is integrated in the publicly available IceSL software. This was a joint work with Haichuan Song, then a post-doctoral researcher in ALICE.