Micromechanical Models for FDM 3D-Printed Polymers: A Review

Due to its large number of advantages compared to traditional subtractive manufacturing techniques, additive manufacturing (AM) has gained increasing attention and popularity. Among the most common AM techniques is fused filament fabrication (FFF), usually referred to by its trademarked name: fused deposition modeling (FDM). This is the most...

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...

Bonding between silicones and thermoplastics using 3D printed mechanical interlocking

Silicones have desirable properties such as skin-safety, high temperature-resistance, and flexibility. Many applications require the presence of a hard body connected to the silicone. Traditionally, it has been difficult to create strong bonding between silicones and hard materials. In this study, a technique is presented to control the...

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...

CrossFill: Foam Structures with Graded Density for Continuous Material Extrusion

The fabrication flexibility of 3D printing has sparked a lot of interest in designing structures with spatially graded material properties. In this paper, we propose a new type of density graded structure that is particularly designed for 3D printing systems based on filament extrusion. In order to ensure high-quality fabrication results,...

Hatching for 3D prints: Line-based halftoning for dual extrusion fused deposition modeling

This work presents a halftoning technique to manufacture 3D objects with the appearance of continuous grayscale imagery for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printers. While droplet-based dithering is a common halftoning technique, this is not applicable to FDM printing, since FDM builds up objects by extruding material in semi-continuous paths....