Strategies for Obtaining Porous Media Through the Process Planning in Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Porous materials or porous media (PM) are found in many applications. The design of the porous structures for specific applications presents challenges that involve their geometric modeling and manufacturing. Additive Manufacturing (AM) has a great potential in this area since it allows porosity planning. In particular, the AM based on the material extrusion principle allows obtaining PM with a planned macro porosity without the need to model it geometrically. This is possible because this principle allows varying a number of manufacturing parameters in the production of lattice geometries. Although there are parameters that allow the creation of PM, the current process planning software still have limitations on the level of customization of the part filling. This work presents the potential of the process planning software called RP3 (Rapid Prototyping Process Planning) to obtain PM with the material extrusion AM technologies. For this, some specific filling strategies were developed such as the staggered raster and the joined filaments. The efficiency of the process planning system was evaluated by manufacturing PM in an open source printer.