Multi-material 3D Printing with Microstructures and Voids

3D printing is common nowadays in industrial and even private use. But the cost of the material can be high. If the object is printed solid, it needs a lot of material. Thereby it is heavy, especially if the object is large, since the material printed inside the model cannot be removed later on. The goal is to find a way to construct an interior structure with less material. The approach of Martinez et al. [6] is a three-dimensional Voronoi structure, which constructs a foam of beams connected to the surface directly or indirectly over other beams. We implement this approach as a shader for Cuttlefish which is a universal 3D printer driver [13]. This approach reduces the amount of material used for a density of 8 seeds per cm2 to only 6% of the material used to print the object solid. However, most of the beams need additional support structures. For further improvement of the material consumption, we expand the approach by stretching the structure to fulfill the feature of the J826 printer from Stratasys driven by Cuttlefish, which can print empty spaces inside the object with a small overhang, but it only allows a deviation of around 6° per slice. For a higher deviation, support material is needed to print the structure. The goal is a structure that can be printed without such additive material, thus reducing the material hence the cost and weight of the object. To evaluate the approach, we test it with different models.