Santoshkrishna Tirumala

Santoshkrishna Tirumala

Framework for Rigid Microstructures

Authors

Jeremy Youngquist, Santosh Tirumala

Mentor

Jorg Peters

College

Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Abstract

New and exotic geometries have been enabled by 3D printing techniques, which could have practical uses in medicine or engineering. Despite research into this topic, there still existed no framework that guaranteed certain properties and enabled efficient adjustment, 3D printing, and analysis. We developed a periodic, or repeating, micro-structure with boundary stiffening, that addressed these challenges. We used a modified version of Kagome lattices, which offered several advantages, called Corner Sharing Tetrahedra (CoSTs) as our basis. We then implemented a series of modification algorithms, such as mapping, joining, stiffening, and refining; we added wire inflation as well. We analyzed the microstructure for its properties through FEM, a traditional yet complex method, and the method of rigidity, a new method that held promise in terms of speed and memory usage. Our results were that we designed and tested a successful microstructure that has many useful features. We also found that the method of rigidity was faster, had 100 times less elements in its respective matrix, and was easier to program than FEM. In conclusion, as our research has still not been completed yet, we would want to add more features to the framework to make it more robust and strengthen the correlation between the number of rigidity and FEM matrix entries. Still, our work so far further advances the real-life applications of manufacturing novel 3D geometries.

Poster

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Research Pitch

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