Design of Adaptive Porous Micro-structures for Additive Manufacturing

The emerging field of additive manufacturing with biocompatible materials has led to customized design of porous micro- structures. Complex micro-structures are characterized by freeform surfaces and spatially varying porosity. Today, there is no CAD system that can handle the design of these microstructures due to their high complexity. In this paper we propose a novel approach for generating a 3D adaptive model of a porous micro-structure based on predefined design. Using our approach a designer can manually select a region of interest (ROI) and define its porosity. In the core of our approach, the multi-resolution volumetric model is used. The generation of an adaptive model may contain topological changes that should be considered. In our approach, the process of designing a customized model is composed of the following stages (a) constructing a multi- resolution volumetric model of a porous structure (b) defining regions of interest (ROI) and their resolution properties (c) constructing the adaptive model. In this research, the approach was initially tested on 2D models and then extended to 3D models. The resulted adapted model can be used for design, mechanical analysis and manufacturing. The feasibility of the method has been applied on bone models that were reconstructed from micro-CT images.