Shell Thickening For Extrusion-Based Ceramics Printing

Additive manufacturing of ceramics gains increasing attention in recent years, as ceramic material like clay processes distinctive merits, including hardness, thermal and chemical stability, etc. The customer-level extrusion-based ceramics 3D printer is getting easily achievable. However, due to its semi-liquid and highly viscoelastic properties, the clay material causes new challenges to the computational aspects. It does not dry instantly and may collapse during the accumulated force from new layers breaks the moment equilibrium, especially when adjacent layers have less overlap region. We tackle this unique problem, focusing on shell-like models in extrusion-based ceramics printing in this paper. We propose a structural analysis algorithm that considers the moment equilibrium for each layer along the fabrication process. We also present a computational framework to enhance the structural stability by local thick-ening of the shell models without affecting the appearance. We demonstrate the printing process and physical results to validate our method. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.