DIGITAL DESIGN FOR VOXEL BASED ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING AND PART CHARACTERISTICS-SOFTWARE TO PRINTER HARDWARE TRANSLATION CORRELATION AND EFFECTIVE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS IN POLY JET PRINTING

摘要

Additive Manufacturing (AM) as a processing technique is now enabling tailored material and structure optimization due to its capability for forming complex materials and geometries, material phases that can be at resolution levels of hundreds of microns. Fundamental to this is digital design that defines the associated material, complex geometries, and their translation in printer hardware during build. Voxel digital designs (similar to a pixel representing colors in a digital image) in PolyJet printing define and build composite parts with a wide range of mechanical properties, material phases and geometries. Voxel digital designs enable to define material at each voxel level. However, compatibility and correct translation between multi-material voxel digital design and 3D printing hardware is required. This paper investigates print quality of designed part configurations (complex shapes, associated materials for geometrical regions) defined via voxel digital designs to understand the correlation between voxel digital designs and AM hardware. Demonstrative AM part configurations with complex material and geometries (using representative geometrical shapes such as circular, gear, elliptical, diamond, hexagonal, etc., as test cases), were digitally designed using voxel printing. Success of additive manufacturing relies on such digital designs being translated correctly without any artifacts by printer hardware. To carefully understand the correlations, Vero White (Hard) material and Tango Black (Soft) material were used to define different materials regions of complex geometries, and built with a PolyJet AM system. Final printed part of each voxel digital design was analyzed. Results indicate that success of printing from our voxel digital designs depended on the hardware factors such as print resolution in different directions of 3D builds, which affected the final geometry and material configurations. Printing hardware factors can be overcome by redefining voxel digital design for printing purpose only. Careful understanding of digital design translation to printer hardware factors provide means to develop effective digital design software solutions. Details of our software solutions with voxel digital designs to obtain desired part quality and correct geometries during AM, without translational digital technology (DT) to hardware technology (HT) translational factors will be discussed and presented.