Continuous Fiber Path Planning Algorithm for 3D Printed Optimal Mechanical Properties.

Mechanical properties of parts produced with continuous filament fabrication are influenced by the print direction, especially if the material deposed is carbon fiber or a fiber-reinforced polymer. This opens the development of new design strategies to fully exploit the unidirectionality of composites, modeling the fibers’ trajectories according to external loads and the part topology. This MSc thesis presents a complete framework that calculates optimal fibers’ paths that achieve minimal compliance for two-dimensional components. The framework is divided into two different sections. In the first one, an algorithm solving a Continuous Fibre Angle Optimization (CFAO) problem is described and solved using a gradient-based optimizer. In the second section, the continuous trajectories are calculated as iso-lines of a level-set surface obtained from the results of the first optimization and are then exported as G-Code. Special attention is devoted to implementing manufacturing constraints, such as fiber continuity and parallelism between the fibers. Various two-dimensional numerical examples are provided to verify the improved mechanical proprieties of the part. The trajectories are then printed using the G-code on a Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) polymer desktop printer to validate the framework from a manufacturing point of view.