Digital Twin Additive Reconstruction Tool for Micromechanical Modeling of 3D-Printed Parts

Abstract

Abstract This paper aimed to implement a Digital Twin Additive Reconstruction tool to create an explicit characterization of layer-by-layer 3D printed parts in CAD software. While there have been previous approaches to 3D printed CAD reconstruction, they have either faced shortcomings in depicting the internal structure accurately or have had accurate depictions of internal structure at the cost of computational time, multiple software interfaces, and complicated workflows. The novelty of our approach lies in outlining a principle of digital twin reconstruction that can be applied to multiple CAD software while keeping a separate universal G-Code Parser module written in Python script. The later module can be adapted to any CAD interface in principle. Our method tried to maintain a simple workflow without compromising the accuracy of internal structure yet preserves the integrity of the reconstructed module per CAD interface without loss of information. Moreover, the user can reduce the computational time by excluding the Boolean Union operation if necessary and selectively reconstruct and union just specific layers upon specifying the layer numbers in our algorithm.