Infill Optimization for Additive Manufacturing—Approaching Bone-Like Porous Structures

Porous structures such as trabecular bone are widely seen in nature. These structures are lightweight and exhibit strong mechanical properties. In this paper, we present a method to generate bone-like porous structures as lightweight infill for additive manufacturing. Our method builds upon and extends voxel-wise topology optimization. In particular, for the purpose of generating sparse yet stable structures distributed in the interior of a given shape, we propose upper bounds on the localized material volume in the proximity of each voxel in the design domain. We then aggregate the local per-voxel constraints by their p-norm into an equivalent global constraint, in order to facilitate an efficient…

• RE
  Research Executive Agency

  Award: 609405
• SF
  Seventh Framework Programme

  Award: FP7/2007-2013