Exceptional Mechanical Performance by Spatial Printing with Continuous Fiber

Guoxin Fang, Tianyu Zhang, Yuming Huang, Zhizhou Zhang, 
Kunal Masania, and Charlie C.L. Wang †    (†Corresponding author)

Techinical Paper (Add. Manuf. Journal) |  Supplemental Video (Youtube) |  Data Set (Github)

This work explores a spatial printing method to fabricate continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites (CFRTPCs), which can achieve exceptional mechanical performance. For models giving complex 3D stress distribution under loads, typical planar-layer based fiber placement usually fails to provide sufficient reinforcement due to their orientations being constrained to planes. The effectiveness of fiber reinforcement could be maximized by using multi-axis additive manufacturing (MAAM) to better control the orientation of continuous fibers in 3D-printed composites.

We propose a computational approach to generate 3D fiber toolpaths that satisfy two reinforcement objectives: 
1) following the maximal stress directions in critical regions;
2) connecting multiple load-bearing regions by continuous fibers. 

A hardware system with dual robotic arms is employed to conduct the physical MAAM tasks depositing polymer or fiber reinforced polymer composite materials by applying a force normal to the extrusion plane to aid consolidation. Details of the robot-assist manufacturing system (Hardware & Control) can be found at: 
https://github.com/zhangty019/Support_Generation_for_Curved_RoboFDM

Contact information: 
Guoxin Fang  (fangguoxin96@gmail.com)
Charlie C.L. Wang  (changling.wang@manchester.ac.uk)