• Basically 4D printing (4DP) is 3D printing (or additive manufacturing) with smart materials. The so obtained objects have the capability to change (depending on what smart materials they are made of), thus a 4rd dimension (time). See two videos illustrating 4DP at the bottom of the page.

• My research on the topic is about developing design methods and tools to facilitate the design process of a 4D printed object.

• The core of my approach to Design for 4DP is a voxel-based modeling and simulation framework for smart materials. A first tool embodying this framework is VoxSmart (a Grasshopper plugin). See below a video showing VoxSmart in action.

In this video, VoxSmart is used to simulate a valve made of heat-responsive hydrogel sections (in red) and other inert sections (in blue). Supported materials include (conventional) linear elastic material, hydrogel, electrostrictive material, magnetostrictive material and piezoelectric material. The tool can be used for:

• simulating a desired distribution of materials,

• computing a distribution given a desired source and target shape, set of materials and stimulus state. The algorithm for computing a distribution is based on genetic algorithm.

A few other examples are presented in papers. The simulated example is a valve which has actually been printed (by another research group), it is shown below

Few illustrations of 4D printing