Optimized Unidirectional and Bidirectional Stiffened Objects for Minimum Material Consumption of 3D Printing

Abstract

3D printing, regarded as the most popular additive manufacturing technology, is finding many applications in various industrial sectors. Along with the increasing number of its industrial applications, reducing its material consumption and increasing the strength of 3D printed objects have become an important topic. In this paper, we introduce unidirectionally and bidirectionally stiffened structures into 3D printing to increase the strength and stiffness of 3D printed objects and reduce their material consumption. To maximize the advantages of such stiffened structures, we investigated finite element analysis, especially for general cases of stiffeners in arbitrary positions and directions, and performed optimization design to minimize the total volume of stiffened structures. Many examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed finite element analysis and optimization design as well as significant reductions in the material costs and stresses in 3D printed objects stiffened with unidirectional and bidirectional stiffeners.

A Novel Multi-Directional Partitioning Method for Support-Free 3D Printing of Inner Runner Structural Components

“…) is a normalizing function defined in Equation (15), and the vector 1) is defined in Equation ( 16).…”

“…Traditionally, in order to avoid the collapse of melted materials during printing processes such as LMD or FDM (fused deposition molding), support structures are usually needed, which is time-consuming and wasteful of materials. Meanwhile, support structure removal processes, which may be time-, labor-, or cost-intensive processes, are inevitable [1]. Usually, it is not feasible to add or remove support structures inside parts with inner runner structures, due to the lack of space.…”