Abstract
This study aims at reporting a strategy of designing cellular materials based on Voronoi–Monte Carlo approach for additive manufacturing. The approach is implemented to produce a fully connected cellular structure in the design space without producing material discontinuity. The main characteristics of the cellular structure, such as the density and the cell size, are controlled by means of two generation parameters, namely the number of seed points and the relaxation time. The generated cellular structures representing various designs of generated cellular wrenches are converted into surface tessellations and manufactured using stereolithography. Bending experiments are performed up to the rupture point and main attributes representing the performance of the SL-based cellular wrenches are studied with respect to the generation parameters. The results show only slight difference between CAD (Computer-Aided Design) models of the design and the real printed parts. The number of seed points is found to control the main feature of the wrench performance whereas the relaxation time is found to have a secondary effect.
Highlights
A cellular structure is a medium composed of solid and gaseous phases, and consists of an interconnected network of solid struts or plates that form the edges and faces of the cells [1]
This work concludes that stereolithography is an adequate processing route to design cellular structures from a Voronoi–Monte Carlo generation scheme
The 3D printed cellular wrenches exhibit a wide variability of density and spatial distribution of the cells, which result in a versatile way to tune the bending performance especially the maximum force
Summary
A cellular structure is a medium composed of solid and gaseous phases, and consists of an interconnected network of solid struts or plates that form the edges and faces of the cells [1]. According to the geometric configuration of each cell unit, the cellular structures can be categorized as foams, Conventional manufacturing methods such as foaming, powder metallurgy, sheet metal forming, or wire bonding processes [13] experience difficulties to control the internal microstructure of the cellular structures and fail to fabricate 3D lattice structures with complex cells. Manufacturing constraints of these fabrication techniques become a barrier to design more elaborated products allowing for a fine control of the performance. Some of the most popular AM systems include stereolithography (SL), laser sintering (LS), fused deposition modelling (FDM) and laminated object manufacturing (LOM), which use liquid, filament/paste, powder and solid sheet material, respectively [15]
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