Anisotropic porous structure modeling for 3D printed objects

Abstract

Porous structures exist widely in both natural materials and our daily life. Thanks to the properties of being lightweight, sustainable and cost efficient, it has been applied to a great extent in material engineering, meanwhile achieving much attention in shape optimization for 3D printing. However, current efforts on modeling porous structures in a given shape either consider uniform pore distributions, or regard the physical constraints as an underlying scalar field, both generating pores in an isotropic manner. The limitation is that the intrinsic directional properties of some physical terms like stresses or elasticities are not considered. It is still challenging to adapt the porous structure with the input tensor field. In this paper, we present an algorithm for modeling anisotropic porous structure, based on anisotropic centroidal Voronoi tessellations and an iteratively optimization framework in a 2.5D domain. Comparisons with isotropic porous structures show that our anisotropic structures have better adaption with the stress tensor field and thus gain better strength-to-weight ratio for the 3D printed model.