Medial Axis Transformation Based Design and Process Planning Methodology for Discrete Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) eases the fabrication of multifunctional simultaneous printing of multi-materials, which is quite cumbersome to fabricate in traditional manufacturing processes. Heterogeneous objects are entities engineered with multiple materials, and their emergence with the advent of AM is sporadic. This paper presents the novel layer decomposition methodology by utilizing Medial Axis Transformation (MAT) to generate discrete volumes for multi-material printing. Further, these discrete geometries are printed using multi-material addons, such as Palette Pro for material extrusion-based Additive Manufacturing systems. Tensile testing is performed to analyze the effectiveness and characteristics of the layer decomposition strategy. However, fabrication of the generated heterogeneous objects utilizes a computational model that maps the geometry of the object with the material composition. This methodology can also be applicable to model compositional heterogeneity for part fabrication using a metal-based Direct Energy Deposition (DED) process.