Design Exploration of Reliably Manufacturable Materials and Structures With Applications to a Microstereolithography System

One of the challenges in designing for additive manufacturing (AM) is accounting for the differences between as-designed and as-built geometries and material properties. From a designer’s perspective, these differences can lead to degradation of part performance, which is especially difficult to accommodate in small-lot or one-of-a-kind production. In this context, each part is unique, and therefore, extensive iteration is costly. Designers need a means of exploring the design space while simultaneously considering the reliability of additively manufacturing particular candidate designs. In this work, a design exploration approach, based on Bayesian network classifiers (BNC), is extended to incorporate manufacturability explicitly into the design exploration process. The example application is the design of negative stiffness (NS) metamaterials, in which small volume fractions of negative stiffness (NS) inclusions are embedded within a host material. The resulting metamaterial or composite exhibits macroscopic mechanical stiffness and loss properties that exceed those of the base matrix material. The inclusions are fabricated with microstereolithography with features on the scale of tens of microns, but variability is observed in material properties and dimensions from specimen to specimen. In this work, the manufacturing variability of critical features of a NS inclusion fabricated via microstereolithography are characterized experimentally and modelled mathematically. Specifically, the variation in the geometry of the NS inclusions and the Young’s modulus of the photopolymer are measured and modeled by both nonparametric and parametric joint probability distributions. Finally, the quantified manufacturing variability is incorporated into the BNC approach as a manufacturability classifier to identify candidate designs that achieve performance targets reliably, even when manufacturing variability is taken into account.