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Stress relief: improving structural strength of 3D printable objects

Published: 01 July 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The use of 3D printing has rapidly expanded in the past couple of years. It is now possible to produce 3D-printed objects with exceptionally high fidelity and precision. However, although the quality of 3D printing has improved, both the time to print and the material costs have remained high. Moreover, there is no guarantee that a printed model is structurally sound. The printed product often does not survive cleaning, transportation, or handling, or it may even collapse under its own weight. We present a system that addresses this issue by providing automatic detection and correction of the problematic cases. The structural problems are detected by combining a lightweight structural analysis solver with 3D medial axis approximations. After areas with high structural stress are found, the model is corrected by combining three approaches: hollowing, thickening, and strut insertion. Both detection and correction steps are repeated until the problems have been eliminated. Our process is designed to create a model that is visually similar to the original model but possessing greater structural integrity.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 31, Issue 4
July 2012
935 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/2185520
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 July 2012
Published in TOG Volume 31, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. 3D printing
  2. physics-based modeling
  3. structural analysis

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