Continuous Representation based Internal Self-supporting Structure via Ellipsoid Hollowing for 3D Printing
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Date
2024
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Hollowing is an effective way to achieve lightweight objectives by removing material from the interior volume while maintaining feasible mechanical properties. However, hollowed models often necessitate the use of additional support materials to prevent collapse during the printing process, which can substantially negate the benefits of weight reduction. We introduce a framework for designing and optimizing self-supporting infill cavities, which are represented and optimized directly using continuous functions based on ellipsoids. Ellipsoids are favored as filling structures due to their advantageous properties, including their self-supporting nature, precise mathematical definability, variable controllability, and stress concentration mitigation capabilities. Thanks to the explicit definability, we formulate the creation of self-supporting infill cavities as a structural stiffness optimization problem using function representations. The utilization of function representation eliminates the necessity for remeshing to depict structures and shapes, thereby enabling the direct computation of integrals and gradients on the functions. Based on the representations, we propose an efficient optimization strategy to determine the shapes, positions, and topology of the infill cavities, with the goal of achieving multiple objectives, including minimizing material cost, maximizing structural stiffness, and ensuring self-supporting. We perform various experiments to validate the effectiveness and convergence of our approach. Moreover, we demonstrate the self-supporting and stability of the optimized structures through actual 3D printing trials and real mechanical testing.
Description
CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Shape analysis; Mesh geometry models; Parametric curve and surface models
@inproceedings{10.2312:pg.20241291,
booktitle = {Pacific Graphics Conference Papers and Posters},
editor = {Chen, Renjie and Ritschel, Tobias and Whiting, Emily},
title = {{Continuous Representation based Internal Self-supporting Structure via Ellipsoid Hollowing for 3D Printing}},
author = {Wang, Shengfa and Yang, Jun and Hu, Jiangbei and Lei, Na and Luo, Zhongxuan and Liu, Ligang},
year = {2024},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-250-9},
DOI = {10.2312/pg.20241291}
}