Abstract
New durable elastomeric materials are commercially available for 3D printing, enabling a new class of consumer wearable applications. The mechanical response of soft 3D printed lattices can now be tailored for improved safety and comfort by (a) leveraging functional grading and (b) customizing the outer envelope to conform specifically to the anatomy of the subject (e.g. patient, athlete, or consumer). Furthermore, electronics can be unobtrusively integrated into these 3D printed structures to provide feedback relating to athletic performance or physical activity. A proposed sensor system was developed that weaves unjacketed wires at two distinct layers in a lattice to form a complex capacitor; the capacitance increases as the lattice is compressed and can detect lattice deformation. A structure was fabricated and demonstrated with both static compression as well as low-velocity impact to highlight the utility for wearable applications. This work is focused on improving the performance of American football helmets as highlighted by the National Football League (NFL) Helmet Challenge Symposium; however, the lattice sensing concept can be extended to metal and ceramic lattices as well - relevant to the automotive and aerospace industries.
Highlights
Additive Manufacturing has been leveraged to fabricate formand-fit prototypes in arbitrary geometries for decades
This paper focuses on the second approach which includes weaving a pair of wires in adjacent unit-cell layers through an elastomer lattice in order to serve as a complex capacitor
A sensorized elastomer lattice was demonstrated; it was shown that the sensor measures both high-performance mechanical response while exhibiting accurate static measurement of deformation and reasonable low-velocity impact sensing
Summary
Additive Manufacturing has been leveraged to fabricate formand-fit prototypes in arbitrary geometries for decades. In 3D printed electronics, conductors serve as interconnect between embedded electronic components with a variety of methods including micro-dispensing, ink jetting and aerosol jetting of conductive inks [10], [13], [14] as well as by the structural embedding of bulk conductors inserted directly into additively-manufactured dielectric substrates [15], [16] The integration of these 3D printed structures with electronics have three possible manufacturing strategies: (a) during fabrication with process interruptions, (b) after fabrication. Within the context of additive manufacturing, lattices are the focus of significant research as the structures since they (a) provide a tailored weight-versus-strength balance and (b) can be fabricated to include strut-size variation – gracefully modulating the density and mechanical response from one side to the other within the structure [17]–[21] Introducing wires into these structures for the embedding of electronics seems to fit into aerospace applications in which light weighting is paramount. In both applications, sensing in these structures provides unprecedented internetof-things data acquisition for structural health monitoring
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