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A new continuous printing path planning method for gradient honeycomb infill structures

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Abstract

Cellular infill structures such as honeycomb have been widely used in the field of light weighting. In recent years, the emergence of additive manufacturing technologies has provided a new solution to fabricate complicated cellular infill structures. This paper presents a continuous printing path planning method for gradient honeycomb structures. Given a 2D filling region represented by a polygon, a honeycomb graph that covers the filling area is trimmed to generate an infill pattern. Then an algorithm is proposed to transform the honeycomb filling pattern into an Eulerian graph, which can be traversed by a single-stroke printing path. For each honeycomb, double-spiral paths are used to generate gradient honeycomb structures with varying wall thicknesses. Later, the 2D honeycomb infills are generalized to 3D cases that are suitable for multi-axis printing. First, three mutually orthogonal vector fields that are embedded on the tetrahedral mesh of the printed part are generated by considering the support-free condition. Then the three vector fields are used to calculate three monotonically increasing scalar distance fields, which span a non-Euclidean space. Finally, the 2D honeycomb infills are generated in the non-Euclidean space with parallel sliced layers, which are then mapped back to the Euclidean space to obtain the real self-supporting 3D honeycomb infills. The proposed 2D/3D honeycomb infill structures generation algorithms have been verified by both simulation and experimental tests.

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Funding

This work is supported by the project of Shaanxi Province Natural Science Basic Research (2022JQ-370), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2022A1515110489), and by National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFB3402200) and Key Project of NSFC (92271205, 12032018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State IJR Center of Aerospace Design and Additive Manufacturing, School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Yamin Li, Shangqin Yuan, Weihong Zhang & Jihong Zhu

  2. Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in ShenzhenSanhang Science & Technology Buliding, No. 45th, Gaoxin South 9th Road, Nanshan District, Shenzhen City, 518063, China

    Yamin Li

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  1. Yamin Li
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  2. Shangqin Yuan
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  3. Weihong Zhang
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  4. Jihong Zhu
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Contributions

Yamin Li: concept, coding, writing. Shangqin Yuan: experiment, review, editing. Weihong Zhang: editing, review. Jihong Zhu: review, funding.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jihong Zhu.

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Appendix

Appendix

Algorithm 1:
figure a

Generation of the honeycomb graph

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Algorithm 2:
figure b

Generation of the Eulerian graph

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Algorithm 3:
figure c

Double spirals filling of a honeycomb

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Li, Y., Yuan, S., Zhang, W. et al. A new continuous printing path planning method for gradient honeycomb infill structures. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 126, 719–734 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-023-11065-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-023-11065-1

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