Expanding manufacturing strategies to advance in porous media planning with material extrusion additive manufacturing

The design of porous structures of porous materials or porous media (PM) presents challenges that involve geometric modeling and manufacturing. Additive Manufacturing (AM) based on material extrusion is an important means for PM production. Although there are basic process parameters in this AM technology that allow for the creation of PM, its full potential has not been explored. Adding to that, the current process planning software still has limitations on the customization level of the part filling. This work describes PM porous structures based on advanced filling strategies specially developed for PM planning and manufacturing using material extrusion AM technologies. The advanced strategies are based on the traditional raster filling pattern, but also introducing new alternatives to it, named staggered raster filling, joined filaments raster filling, function controlled variable road gap raster filling, and combinations of them. These proposed strategies were implemented in an in-house software called RP3 (Rapid Prototyping Process Planning) and the manufactured PM were analyzed with X-ray micro-computed tomography. The results showed that the process planning system was efficient in attaining the proposed PM with the new configurations, which were successfully manufactured with an open-source 3D printer. With these options, it is possible to considerably expand the design possibilities to create PM, ranging from a well-structured pattern to a highly heterogeneous configuration.

Automated summary

The study focuses on the design and manufacturing of porous structures of porous materials based on advanced filling strategies, using material extrusion AM technology. By introducing new filling methods, various PM structures have been successfully created, expanding the design possibilities.