With these new findings and resulting examples, all the reasons we find 3D printing great for production purposes become even greater with further massive potential and previously unheard-of customizations, efficiency and simplicity in workflow, and savings on the bottom line in production.
Basically, although a family of microstructures are essentially cut from the same cloth, they are able to be markedly different in terms of mobility, and this can be cut down to size even further, demonstrating that all of the 3D printed parts that are responsible for constructing one item such as a teddy bear can do different things–so all in one teddy bear one could feasibly observe moving, bending limbs, a soft middle, and a stiff head structure.
“Many functional objects in our everyday life consist of elastic, deformable material, and the material properties are often inextricably linked to function,” said Christian Schumacher, a PhD computer graphics student at ETH Zurich and at Disney Research. “3D printing usually involves only a single material or a very small set of materials. However, 3D printing easily produces complex, 3D microstructures which we can use to create metamaterials with properties beyond those of standard printer materials.”
Schumacher and his team worked with the metamaterials, which change their shape and properties depending on their structure. They found that the key was in arranging microstructures with the appropriate properties and using a variety of them so that one construction could have varying elastic properties due to the different regions all found within its one piece. This was all achieved through creating and calculating unique algorithms which were then used in designing the tiled microstructures.
“To create an object with spatially varying elastic properties, we tile the object’s interior with microstructures drawn from these families, generating a different microstructure for each cell using an efficient algorithm to select compatible structures for neighboring cells,” explained the Disney research team in their publication regarding the microstructures.
With just a “single base material” they are also able to demonstrate their innovation in materials with a soft armadillo toy that is basically an aesthetic covering functioning due to the microstructures within that offer the varying elastic abilities.
“Our method tackles two basic problems,” states the team. “First, we approach the question of how to efficiently generate the structure for given elastic behavior. During pre-processing, we build a data-driven model that can generate such structures. We then look at the problem of how to combine multiple distinct structures inside a single object. This enables us to generate objects with spatially varying properties.”
“After choosing a set of structures, we combined them to create a model that we could 3D print. We used our models to generate and print a number of examples.”
Schumacher and his team will be discussing their findings on this subject next week in Los Angeles at ACM SIGGRAPH 2015, held August 9-13.
Discuss your thoughts on these new findings in materials research in the 3D Printed Objects with Varying Elasticities forum thread over at 3DPB.com. Check out the video below demonstrating and explaining the concept.