Exceptional mechanical performance by spatial printing with continuous fiber: Curved slicing, toolpath generation and physical verification

This work explores a spatial printing method to fabricate continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites (CFRTPCs), which can achieve exceptional mechanical performance. For models giving complex 3D stress distribution under loads, typical planar-layer based fiber placement usually fails to provide sufficient reinforcement due to their...

Toolpath Generation for Fused Filament Fabrication of Functionally Graded Materials

The products in our day to day lives have different requirements in different regions of the product. One way of dealing with such spatially varying requirements is to divide the product into multiple parts and assign each part a different material. For example, the handle of a drill is often fitted with a rubbery material which gives it more...

A Framework for Adaptive Width Control of Dense Contour-Parallel Toolpaths in Fused Deposition Modeling

3D printing techniques such as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) have enabled the fabrication of complex geometry quickly and cheaply. Objects are produced by filling (a portion of) the 2D polygons of consecutive layers with contour-parallel extrusion toolpaths. Uniform width toolpaths consisting of inward offsets from the outline polygons...

Variable-width contouring for additive manufacturing

In most layered additive manufacturing processes, a tool solidifies or deposits material while following pre-planned trajectories to form solid beads. Many interesting problems arise in this context, among which one concerns the planning of trajectories for filling a planar shape as densely as possible. This is the problem we tackle in the...