Tunable Material Properties

Through both simulation and experiment we hope to explore the material properties, and the unique possibilities enabled by having deterministic control over the internal material distribution of a solid. The fact that a digital fabrication process can inherently combine materials of a wide range of material properties has far-reaching implications in the realm of tunable materials.

For instance, randomly combining stiff and flexible voxels yields a material with an intermediate stiffness which can be controlled purely by the ratio of the two materials. Using the concept of voxel microstructure, non-intuitive properties such as negative Poisson's ratio can be obtained.

Fortunately, as more voxels are added, the random errors tend to cancel and the error of a structure grows sub-linearly. When a system of voxels interlocks positively the error is practically constant no matter the size of the structure. Practically, the means that a digital fabricator can fabricate objects that are more precise than its own positioning system and scale to many, many voxels.

Hiller, J., Lipson, H. (2010) "Tunable digital material properties for 3D voxel printers", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp.241 - 247

Hiller J., Lipson H., (2008) “Tunable Digital Material Properties for 3D Voxel Printers”, Proceedings of the 19th Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin TX, Aug 2008.

Hiller, J., Lipson, H., (2009) "Design and analysis of digital materials for physical 3D voxel printing", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 137-149.