Computer-aided design of porous artifacts

The design and fabrication of such heterogeneous structures requires new techniques for solid models to represent 3D heterogeneous objects with complex material properties. This paper presents a representation of model density and porosity based on stochastic geometry. While density has been previously studied in the solid modeling literature, porosity is a relatively new problem. Modeling porosity of bio-materials is critical for developing replacement bone tissues. The paper uses this representation to develop an approach to modeling of porous, heterogeneous materials and provides experimental data to validate the approach. The authors believe that their approach introduces ideas from the stochastic geometry literature to a new set of engineering problems. It is hoped that this paper stimulates researchers to find new opportunities that extend these ideas to be more broadly applicable for other computational geometry, graphics and computer-aided design problems.