We present a field-based method of toolpath generation for 3D printing continuous fibre reinforced thermoplastic composites. Our method employs the strong anisotropic material property of continuous fibres by generating toolpaths along the directions of tensile stresses in the critical regions. Moreover, the density of toolpath distribution is controlled in an adaptive way proportionally to the values of stresses. Specifically, a vector field is generated from the stress tensors under given loads and processed to have better compatibility between neighboring vectors. An optimal scalar field is computed later by making its gradients approximate the vector field. After that, isocurves of the scalar field are extracted to generate the toolpaths for continuous fibre reinforcement, which are also integrated with the boundary conformal toolpaths in user selected regions. The performance of our method has been verified on a variety of models in different loading conditions. Experimental tests are conducted on specimens by 3D printing continuous carbon fibres (CCF) in a polylactic acid (PLA) matrix. Compared to reinforcement by load-independent toolpaths, the specimens fabricated by our method show up to 71.4% improvement on the mechanical strength in physical tests when using the same (or even slightly smaller) amount of continuous fibres.

In this paper, we present a new computational pipeline for designing and fabricating 4D garments as knitwear that considers comfort during body movement. This is achieved by careful control of elasticity distribution to reduce uncomfortable pressure and unwanted sliding caused by body motion. We exploit the ability to knit patterns in different elastic levels by single-jersey jacquard (SJJ) with two yarns. We design the distribution of elasticity for a garment by physics-based computation, the optimized elasticity on the garment is then converted into instructions for a digital knitting machine by two algorithms proposed in this paper. Specifically, a graph-based algorithm is proposed to generate knittable stitch meshes that can accurately capture the 3D shape of a garment, and a tiling algorithm is employed to assign SJJ patterns on the stitch mesh to realize the designed distribution of elasticity. The effectiveness of our approach is verified on simulation results and on specimens physically fabricated by knitting machines.

Multi-axis additive manufacturing enables high flexibility of material deposition along dynamically varied directions. The Cartesian motion platforms of these machines include three parallel axes and two rotational axes. Singularity on rotational axes is a critical issue to be tackled in motion planning for ensuring high quality of manufacturing results. The highly nonlinear mapping in the singular region can convert a smooth toolpath with uniformly sampled waypoints defined in the model coordinate system into a highly discontinuous motion in the machine coordinate system, which leads to over-extrusion/under-extrusion of materials in filament-based additive manufacturing. The problem is challenging as both the maximal and the minimal speeds at the tip of a printer head must be controlled in motion. Moreover, collision may occur when sampling-based collision avoidance is employed. In this letter, we present a motion planning method to support the manufacturing realization of designed toolpaths for multi-axis additive manufacturing. Problems of singularity and collision are considered in an integrated manner to improve the motion therefore the quality of fabrication.

The anisotropy of mechanical strength on a 3D printed model can be controlled in a multi-axis 3D printing system as materials can be accumulated along dynamically varied directions. In this paper, we present a new computational framework to generate specially designed layers and toolpaths of multi-axis 3D printing for strengthening a model by aligning filaments along the directions with large stresses. The major challenge comes from how to effectively decompose a solid into a sequence of strength-aware and collision-free working surfaces. We formulate it as a problem to compute an optimized governing field together with a selected orientation of fabrication setup. Iso-surfaces of the governing field are extracted as working surface layers for filament alignment. Supporting structures in curved layers are constructed by extrapolating the governing field to enable the fabrication of overhangs. Compared with planar-layer based Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology, models fabricated by our method can withstand up to 6.35× loads in experimental tests.