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Truss Structure Design |
We are identifying the unique capabilities of layer-based, additive fabrication technologies and identifying fundamental design principles and primitives that can be used to design products that take advantage of these unique capabilities. Ultimately, we want to have leading design methods and tools for products manufactured on additive fabrication machines, such as our “5-Axis SLA Machine” that we reported on last year. Work over the past two years has focused on the application of regular patterns of truss elements throughout parts and structures – where it is the truss elements that serve as design primitives. By arraying these primitives throughout the interior of a part, it is possible to generate many types of truss and honeycomb-like structures. In this manner, we can replace solid blocks of material in a part design with a honeycomb-like truss structure as a means of reducing its mass. The key uniqueness of our approach is our ability to generate conformal truss structure – where the truss elements deform to conform to the parts shape. That is, the part can better distribute stresses through the conformal truss structure than a uniform structure. This idea can be seen in the various figures throughout this report. Hongqing Vincent Wang is the student working on this project, supervised by David Rosen. Vincent graduated with his Masters degree in Fall 2001 and will continue to pursue a Ph.D. In the past year, we have applied the truss structure approach to several industry structures and parts. Additionally, we have explored the application to light-weight robot arms to make them as stiff, strong, and light as possible. For example, the figure shown here is demonstrates an application to an industrial robot, the Cobra 600 from Adept Technology. Based upon this work, we believe that there are four application areas for this technology: craftsmanship models, that is, visual models used to assess the aesthetic characteristics of CAD models, large models where stiffness and light weight are critical, high speed machinery, where high stiffness-to-weight ratios are necessary to lower the inertia of moving parts, and tooling, where the capability to tailor strength and cooling characteristics with physical paths through truss elements may offer unique advantages. These application areas have tremendous potential in the aerospace and automotive industries, as well as others such as Industrial Design. Basically, we want to replace thick sections or thick skins of parts with a thinner skin that is backed-up with truss structure. At present, we have software that generates conformal truss structures in CAD models of virtually any shape. We are working to make the software easier and faster to use. Earlier this year, we submitted an invention disclosure and provisional patent application on this technology. |
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