An Automated Design and Fabrication Pipeline for Improving the Strength of 3D Printed Artifacts under Tensile Loading

In the scope of this study, an alternative automated method to the conventional design and fabrication pipeline of 3D printers is developed by using an integrated CAD/CAE/CAM approach. It increases the load carrying capacity of the parts by constructing heterogeneous infill structures. Traditional CAM software of Additive Manufacturing machinery starts with a design model in STL file format which only includes data about the outer boundary in the triangular mesh form. Depending on the given infill percentage, the algorithm running behind constructs the interior of the artifact by using homogeneous infill structures. As opposed to the current CAM software, the proposed method provides a way to construct heterogeneous infill structures with respect to the Von Misses stress field results obtained from a finite element analysis. Throughout the work, Rhinoceros3D is used for the design of the parts along with Grasshopper3D, an algorithmic design tool for Rhinoceros3D. In addition, finite element analyses are performed using Karamba3D, a plug-in for Grasshopper3D. According to the results of the tensile tests, the method offers an improvement of load carrying capacity about 50% compared to traditional slicing algorithms of 3D printing