Rapid Manufacturing of Digital Materials

The transition from analog to digital has revolutionized many fields over the past century – most notably computation and communication – and can be used to similarly revolutionize additive manufacturing technology. Digital materials are composed of many discrete, self-aligning voxels placed in a massively parallel layer deposition process, as opposed to continuous (analog) deposition techniques. Digital principles allow for perfect replication and zero noise despite using a noisy and inaccurate substrate. The paradigm of digital printing with prefabricated voxels enables parts composed of multiple materials with mutually incompatible processing characteristics and specific functionality to be effortlessly combined in a single freeform fabrication process. We have demonstrated a proof of concept digital fabricator capable of printing spheres of multiple materials at mm-scale resolution, including printing of hybrid metal/polymer parts. This research demonstrates the feasibility of a massively parallel assembly process of digital materials, with the potential to scale to millions of voxels per layer. We have also explored the physical properties of these digital materials through detailed simulations. These pave the way for creating composite materials with unprecedented control over material properties, microstructure, and failure mode. Additionally, we have developed software tools that allow a user to hierarchically design digital microstructures and objects. More importantly, the user can simply input high level goals such as stiffness in regards to loading conditions or the conditions for a compliant actuator, and the blueprint for these complex structures or mechanisms is automatically generated for the digital fabrication process. By combining the advantages of the digital realm with the reality of an additive manufacturing process, we seek to further blur the line between the digital computational world and the real physical world. This in turn can revolutionize the way 3D parts and devices are conceptualized, designed, and fabricated by enabling an unprecedented level of customization to objects created by a simple, rapid desktop manufacturing process.