3-D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface.
But this week, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present “Foundry,” a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials.
In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process. Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part.
In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn’t been possible before.
It’s like Photoshop for 3-D materials, allowing you to design objects made of new composite materials that have the optimal mechanical, thermal, and conductive properties that you need for a given task
To demonstrate, the team designed and fabricated a ping-pong paddle, skis with retro-reflective surfaces, a tricycle wheel, a helmet, and even a bone that could someday be used for surgical planning.
Redesigning multi-material objects in existing design tools would take experienced engineers many days — and some designs would actually be completely infeasible. With Foundry, you can create these designs in minutes.
Foundry lets you mix and match any combination of materials and also assign specific properties to different parts of the object.
Users can preview their design in real-time, rather than having to wait until the final steps in the printing process to see what it will look like.
Using Foundry to exploit the full capabilities of the 3-D printing platform enables many practical applications in medicine and more. Surgeons could create high-quality replicas of objects like bones to practice on, while doctors could also develop more comfortable dentures and other products that would benefit from having both soft and rigid components.
