Printing 3D objects with interlocking parts

Recent advances in 3D printing technologies bring wide range of applications from fast prototyping to product manufacturing. However, one intrinsic limitation of 3D printing is that we cannot fabricate a single object that is larger than the working volume of a 3D printer. To address this issue, we may partition the given object into 3D parts of manageable sizes for printing, and then assemble the object from the printed 3D parts. Rather than using connectors, glue, or skew, we propose to connect the printed 3D parts by 3D interlocking such that the assembled object can be not only repeatedly disassembled and reassembled, but also strongly connected by the parts' own geometry. To achieve these, we develop a voxelization-based approach to partition a given 3D model into 3D interlocking parts. To guarantee the generated 3D parts to be structurally sound and well-connected by 3D interlocking, we deform the local geometry of the 3D model to avoid voxel fragmentation, employ internal voxels to create initial interlocking parts, and analyze the local shape within voxels to guide the final parts construction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on 3D models with a variety of shapes, and realize some of them by 3D printing. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.