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Skeleton-Sectional Structural Analysis for 3D Printing

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Abstract

3D printing has become popular and has been widely used in various applications in recent years. More and more home users have motivation to design their own models and then fabricate them using 3D printers. However, the printed objects may have some structural or stress defects as the users may be lack of knowledge on stress analysis on 3D models. In this paper, we present an approach to help users analyze a model’s structural strength while designing its shape. We adopt sectional structural analysis instead of conventional FEM (Finite Element Method) analysis which is computationally expensive. Based on sectional structural analysis, our approach imports skeletons to assist in integrating mesh designing, strength computing and mesh correction well. Skeletons can also guide sections building and load calculation for analysis. For weak regions with high stress over a threshold value in the model from analysis result, our system corrects them by scaling the corresponding bones of skeleton so as to make these regions stiff enough. A number of experiments have demonstrated the applicability and practicability of our approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Wen-Peng Xu, Wei Li & Li-Gang Liu

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, Henan Polytechnic University, Jiaozuo, 454100, China

    Wen-Peng Xu

Authors
  1. Wen-Peng Xu
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  2. Wei Li
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  3. Li-Gang Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Li-Gang Liu.

Additional information

Special Section of CVM 2016

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61222206 and 11526212, the 100 Talents Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Science and Technology Project of Henan Province of China under Grant No. 162102310090, and the Key Scientific Research Projects of the Higher Education Institutions of Henan Province of China under Grant No. 16A520011.

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Xu, WP., Li, W. & Liu, LG. Skeleton-Sectional Structural Analysis for 3D Printing. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 31, 439–449 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-016-1638-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-016-1638-2

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