Collaborative Research: HCC: Medium: Co-Design of Shape and Fabrication Plans for Direct-Ink Write Printing Through Predictive Simulation

基于挤出的3D打印正在成为航空航天、汽车、医疗和国防应用中的重要工具，所有这些应用都需要对其组件具有最高的信心。随着用于缓冲、冲击吸收以及传感器和致动器集成的3D打印部件的使用越来越多，正确解释和塑造部件制造方式的设计工具的重要性从未如此突出。尽管有这种需求，但目前的设计工具只关注零件的外部几何形状，而忽略了打印过程本身。换句话说，重点是打印什么，而不是如何打印，例如打印机喷嘴在打印零件的每一层时所采取的路径，尽管打印过程对最终零件的机械性能有至关重要的影响。这项研究将改变3D打印零件的设计，首次允许用户不仅设计零件的形状，还设计其功能。该项目开发的新算法将自动从用户指定的机械行为映射到制造计划，该计划指定打印机应如何制造零件的低级别细节，以实现这些目标。 由于制造业应用程序以一种可访问的、有形的方式激发学生对STEM的兴趣，因此该项目将通过围绕制造业和STEM职业之间的关系开发教育材料，产生额外的广泛影响。并通过与当地外展工作建立联系来分享项目成果。这项工作将通过创建新的算法来缩小“形式-功能设计差距”，设计物体的宏观形状和微观制造计划，用于基于直接墨水写入（DIW）技术的3D打印机。 将开发一种微结构感知的基于杆的模拟，以准确地分析DIW打印部件的机械行为，比传统的有限元方法更有效。通过允许制造计划的连续变化，该项目中定义的新型中间表示将为增材制造的新交互式搜索和离线优化策略打开大门。最后，研究将开发一种新的双层优化策略，可以联合设计对象的几何形状和制造计划，同时解决的挑战，每个几何设计定义一个不同的流形可能的制造计划。在这项工作中开发的算法将在实验室和模拟基准的机械实验进行彻底的测试。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

Extrusion-based 3D printing is becoming an important tool in aerospace, automotive, medical, and defense applications, all of which require the highest confidence in their components. With the growth in the use of 3D-printed parts designed for cushioning, impact absorption, and integration of sensors and actuators, the importance of design tools that correctly account for and shape how a part is fabricated has never been more pronounced. Despite this need, current design tools focus exclusively on the part's outer geometric shape and ignore the printing process itself. In other words, the focus is on what is being printed rather than on how it's being printed, such as the path the printer nozzle takes when printing each layer of the part, despite the crucial effect the printing process has on the mechanical properties of the final part. This research will transform the design of 3D-printed parts by allowing users, for the first time, to design not only the part's shape but also its function. New algorithms developed by this project will automatically map from user-specified mechanical behavior to a Fabrication Plan that specifies the low-level details of how the printer should fabricate the part in order to achieve those goals. Since manufacturing applications excite students about STEM in an accessible, tangible way, this project will have additional broad impact by developing educational materials around the relationship between manufacturing and STEM careers, and by sharing project outcomes through established connections to local outreach efforts.This work will close the "form-function design gap" by creating new algorithms for co-designing both an object's macroscale shape and microscale fabrication plan, for 3D printers based on Direct-Ink-Write (DIW) technology. A microstructure-aware rod-based simulation will be developed to accurately analyze mechanical behavior of DIW-printed parts an order of magnitude more efficiently than traditional finite element methods. By allowing continuous variation of fabrication plans, the novel intermediate representation defined in this project will open the door for new interactive search and offline optimization strategies for additive manufacturing. Finally, the research will develop a novel bi-level optimization strategy that can jointly design object geometry and fabrication plan, while solving the challenge that each geometric design defines a different manifold of possible fabrication plans. The algorithms developed in this effort will be thoroughly tested against both mechanical experiments in the lab and simulated benchmarks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.