Title: Digital porosity

Authors: Panagiotis Michalatos; Andrew Payne

Addresses: Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 2 Peabody Terrace, Apartment 1601, Cambridge MA 02138, USA; Autodesk, Inc., 320 West Earle Street, Greenville SC 29609, USA ' Autodesk, Inc., 320 West Earle Street, Greenville SC 29609, USA

Abstract: A flexible and interactive method to design porosity patterns should give designers the ability to control the porosity gradient (i.e., the ratio of solid to void at different locations in space), pore radii, cell topology, directionality, and shape including variations in thickness, curvature and texture. In this paper, we present a method for combining volumetric texture coordinates with halftoning typographic techniques to enable an arbitrary "flow" of a micro-pattern defined by the potential fields of the texture coordinates. We call this method modulated pattern binarisation. Using this approach, we can leverage and even extend existing techniques developed for 2D surface reparameterisation, image analysis and typography. Furthermore, we examine a set of methods which can be used to analyse the geometric properties of both the pattern cell and its mapping. We conclude by discussing some of the possible techniques available for materialising porous structures using additive manufacturing (AM).

Keywords: cellular solid; porous materials; volumetric modelling; voxel representation; additive manufacturing; CAD; computer aided modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRAPIDM.2018.092907

International Journal of Rapid Manufacturing, 2018 Vol.7 No.2/3, pp.219 - 239

Received: 26 Jun 2017
Accepted: 05 Oct 2017
Published online: 02 Jul 2018 *

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