Geometric Modelling of Heterogeneous Lattice Structures through Function Representation with LatticeQuery

DS 122: Proceedings of the Design Society: 24th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED23)

Year: 2023
Editor: Kevin Otto, Boris Eisenbart, Claudia Eckert, Benoit Eynard, Dieter Krause, Josef Oehmen, Nad
Author: Letov, Nikita; Zhao, Yaoyao Fiona
Series: ICED
Institution: McGill University
Section: Design Methods
Page(s): 2045-2054
DOI number: https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2023.205
ISBN: -
ISSN: -

Abstract

Lattice structures are lightweight and possess other unique mechanical and physical properties. Additive manufacturing techniques are often used to produce these structures. Additive manufacturing provides manufacturing freedom that significantly surpasses the one provided by conventional subtractive manufacturing. However, a gap exists between the manufacturing freedom and the geometric modelling freedom in additive manufacturing: it can be extremely challenging to model the designed part because of its high geometric complexity, such as heterogeneous lattice structures. While several tools on the market allow geometric modelling of such structures available on the market, the customization of lattice parameters can still be significantly improved. Moreover, no open-source tools exist to address this issue or to model lattice structures in general. This work presents a novel open-source library for the geometric modelling of lattice structures with customized parameters. The parameter customization is enabled with the function representation approach.

Keywords: Additive Manufacturing, Functional modelling, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Design methods