Section: New Results

Extrusion-Based Ceramics Printing with Strictly-Continuous Deposition

Participants : Jean Hergel, Kevin Hinz, Bernhard Thomaszewski, Sylvain Lefebvre.

3D printing with extruded ceramic paste induces constraints that deviate significantly from standard thermoplastic materials. In particular existing path generation methods for thermoplastic materials rely on transfer moves to navigate between different print paths in a given layer. However, when printing with clay, these transfer moves can lead to severe artifacts and failure.

We explored how to eliminate transfer moves altogether by generating deposition paths that are continuous within and across layers. In each layer, we optimize a continuous support path with respect to length, smoothness, and distance to the model. Comparisons to existing path generation methods designed for thermoplastic materials show that our method substantially improves print quality and often makes the difference between success and failure.

This work was primarily done at the University of Montréal in collaboration with Sylvain Lefebvre. It was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics 2019 [13], and presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 by Jean Hergel.

Figure 6. Our technique greatly improves the reliability of 3D printing with extruded clay.