Creating interior support structures with Lightweight Voronoi Scaffold

Abstract

Nowadays product designers have possibilities to design complex geometries, since for instance with additive manufacturing, there is less technological limits then before. However, besides that they have geometric freedom, it is essential to pay attention to engineering aspects, such as efficient material usage, stiffness and so on. This article is dealing with internal support structures and introduces a new lattice, called Lightweight Voronoi Scaffold. The scaffolds as 3-dimensional structures are well known in numerous fields of science. These structures provide mechanical stiffness for bones and place for biomolecules as well. The aim of this research was testing this new structure in case of complex geometry with multiaxial load case. Therefore, the arrangement of Voronoi scaffold is not regular, random sampling-based Monte Carlo method was applied in order to provide proper distribution of generation of geometric instances. Although the random point seed generates a high number of improper geometries, the remaining ones always include notable solutions. Lightweight Voronoi Scaffold was compared to some common regular beam lattices, and results shown that Lightweight Voronoi Scaffold was lighter in each case, that may open new opportunities in the field of additive manufacturing.