STL-Free Adaptive Slicing Scheme for Additive Manufacturing of Cellular Materials

Abstract

In recent years, advances in additive manufacturing (AM) techniques have called for a scalable fabrication framework for high-resolution designs. Despite several process-specific handful design approaches, there is a gap to fill between computer-aided design (CAD) and the manufacturing of highly detailed multi-scale materials, especially for delicate cellular materials design. This gap ought to be filled with an avenue capable of efficiently slicing multi-scale intricate designs. Most existing methods depend on the mesh representation, which is time-consuming and memory-hogging to generate. This paper proposes an adaptive direct slicing (mesh-free) pipeline that exploits the function representation (FRep) for hierarchical architected cellular materials design. To explore the capabilities of the presented approach, several sample structures with delicate architectures are fabricated using a stereolithography (SLA) printer. The computational efficiency of the proposed slicing algorithm is studied. Furthermore, the geometry frustration problem brought by the connection of distinct structures between functionally graded unit cells at the micro-scale level is also investigated.