Field Based Computation for Vector 3D Printing

Although additive manufacturing is called 3D printing, the fabrication in most cases is still in a 2.5D way - materials are accumulated layer upon layer in planes along a fixed printing direction, restricting the flexibility of 3DP. The commonly identified problems of the current 2.5D printing practice are i) weak mechanical strength between the layers of materials, ii) additional supporting structures that are hard to remove and lead to the waste of material and fabrication time, iii) staircase appearance on the surface of printed models. Moreover, this planar fabrication also forbids printing anisotropically strong materials such as carbon fibres along designed paths like "tendons in muscles" to reinforce the mechanical strength or printing on top of curved surfaces for advanced electrical / biological functions. All restrict the fast growth of 3DP technology. These limitations can be overcome by the strategy of Vector 3D Printing (Vec3DP) that extrudes materials along dynamically varied directions. Adding more Degrees-of-Freedom (DoFs) onto the 3D printer and controlling its multi-axis motion is less difficult to implement on hardware. Robotic arms for welding or advanced multi-axis milling machines have already realised this sort of motion. However, the state-of-the-art lacks a computational kernel to effectively generate optimised toolpaths / motions of Vec3DP for models with complex geometry and material distribution although there are some pilot works that can produce relatively simple models. In this talk, I will introduce our recent research effort of investigating a field-based computation paradigm to push the boundary of Vec3DP.