I-Corps: Multi-axis Additive Manufacturing Process for Performance-Optimized Composites

The broader impact / commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to significantly increase the strength of 3-dimentional (3D) printed parts, to enable flexible fabrication of optimized composite structures, and to reduce material consumption and overall production cost of the parts. These impacts are enabled by a novel design optimization algorithm that simultaneously optimizes part geometry and 3D printing toolpath.

Leveraging industrial robots as the 3D printing platform, the algorithm creates printing toolpaths along multiple build axes, which enables the alignment of composite materials along a part's predicted principal loads. The technology offers potential customers an opportunity to get additional value from the materials they are already using in production.

The first benefit is in the context of the amount of material used and the second, in final part performance through increased mechanical properties relative to the end-use application while also reducing weight. These improvements will be of value to industries interested in creating high-performance composite parts where minimizing part mass. The products may be useful in achieving key design objective for aerospace, automotive, prosthetics, and athletic equipment.

This I-Corps project develops a novel additive manufacturing technology and computational design algorithm that optimizes material deposition to dramatically increase the strength of 3D printed composite parts. The technology directly addresses the limitations of existing 3D printing technologies where the repetitive, stacked layer interfaces result in a part with inherent weaknesses aligned with the build direction.

This project's technology focus combines multi-axis robotics, additive manufacturing, and topology optimization to enable concurrent optimization of part topology and printing toolpath such that the printed material is strategically aligned within the part to maximize performance. The algorithm optimizes material distribution and orientation relative to the part's end-use application, propagates deposition paths aligned to those orientations, and orders the deposition paths to enable collision-free deposition.

The combination of multi-axis robotics and the optimized printing toolpath enables true 3D material deposition that removes the inter- and intra-layer bonds from the load paths acting on the structure, which enables direct additive manufacturing of end-use, load-bearing, composite structures. The topology and multi-axis toolpath optimization workflow has resulted in printed parts with significant improvement in strength as compared to parts fabricated using conventional 3-axis 3D printing techniques.

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.