One of the bigger technical hurdles facing 3-D printing has been how to work multiple types of materials in the same project. Researchers at MIT say they've achieved a major breakthrough that's the equivalent of Photoshop for 3-D printing. Here are the details from MIT's website:
This week, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory(CSAIL) will present “Foundry,” a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials.
“In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process,” says PhD student Kiril Vidimče, who is first author on the paper. “Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part.”
In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn’t been possible before.
“It’s like Photoshop for 3-D materials, allowing you to design objects made of new composite materials that have the optimal mechanical, thermal, and conductive properties that you need for a given task,” says Vidimče. “You are only constrained by your creativity and your ideas on how to combine materials in novel ways.”
The researchers were able to print some fairly sophisticated products, including a pair of skis and a helmet, and also tested its ease of use by having non-designers take a crack, with highly successful results.
Initial modeling of an object is done in a traditional CAD program such as SolidWorks, MIT explains. Foundry employs a system of "operators" that determine the objects material composition at a fine-grained level.
MIT's team will present a paper on Foundry at a technical conference this week in Tokyo. They haven't conducted a formal user study just yet, saying there's no other system out there that would be appropriate to compare it against.
The group expects Foundry "will be used for a wide range of applications as multi-material printing becomes a commodity," according to the research paper. In the future, Foundry could be integrated with existing modeling tools, providing the ability to model both the object's geometry and compositional materials iteratively in a single system, the paper adds.
Analysis: Foundry's Vision Points to the Next Era of 3-D Printing
What the MIT researchers say they've achieved with Foundry is something that could help the 3-D printing industry break through some big barriers, particularly when coupled with the likes of the university's MultiFab, which can print items using up to 10 materials at a time.
Already, 3-D printing has had a significant impact on manufacturing for its use in rapid prototyping, product design iteration, virtual inventory and other areas. If Foundry lives up to its billing, a future where high-volume manufacturing of sophisticated products—with mass customization to boot—may not be far away.
Foundry's approach speaks to a much more ambitious goal than mass-produced widgets. As the researchers note in the paper:
Modern skis have complex internal structures and are built from a wooden core with composites providing additional strength. Geometrically, the 3D model matches modern ski design - it’s parabolic and contains side cuts. The core is flexible, made of a rubber-like material and its diameter is determined in a data-driven fashion. We ran a stress-strain simulation and identified the stress on the skis when bearing weight from a 3-year old. We stored the output data in a texture and used it in a custom operator to convert the simulated stress-strain into the desired core diameter. To minimize ski torsion and provide rigidity, we used the short fibers operator to reinforce the rubber core with beams vertically and across the ski width, thus constructing a traditional composite.
Now, nobody is contending the Foundry-produced skis come close to performing like a set of traditionally manufactured Rossignols, but that level of sophistication in 3-D printed products is the vision.
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