SpatialFiberPrinting

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 (Arxiv) | 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

When comparing to planar-layer based printing results in tension, up to 644% breaking forces and 240% stiffness are observed on shapes fabricated by our spatial printing method (with same amount of material usage). Material characterization of the breaking regions shown that the material failure has changed from the delamination between fiber and matrix material (up) into the fiber fracture (bottom) with fiber reinforcement printed with spatial toolpath. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various complex load cases which demonstrate their successful implementation of continuous fiber printing in various 3D models (please refer to technical paper for details).

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