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Sequential Support: 3D Printing Dissolvable Support Material for Time-Dependent Mechanisms

Published: 17 March 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a different perspective on the use of support material: rather than printing support structures for overhangs, our idea is to make use of its transient nature, i.e. the fact that it can be dissolved when placed in a solvent, such as water. This enables a range of new use cases, such as quickly dissolving and replacing parts of a prototype during design iteration, printing temporary assembly labels directly on the object that leave no marks when dissolved, and creating time-dependent mechanisms, such as fading in parts of an image in a shadow art piece or releasing relaxing scents from a 3D printed structure sequentially overnight. Since we use regular support material (PVA), our approach works on consumer 3D printers without any modifications. To facilitate the design of objects that leverage dissolvable support, we built a custom 3D editor plugin that includes a simulation showing how support material dissolves over time. In our evaluation, our simulation predicted geometries that are statistically similar to the example shapes within 10% error across all samples.

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  1. Sequential Support: 3D Printing Dissolvable Support Material for Time-Dependent Mechanisms

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    TEI '19: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction
    March 2019
    785 pages
    ISBN:9781450361965
    DOI:10.1145/3294109
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 17 March 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. 3d printing
    2. support material

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    TEI '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 110 submissions, 33%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 393 of 1,367 submissions, 29%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)CompuMat: A Computational Composite Material for Tangible InteractionProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3573120(1-5)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
    • (2023)Designing a Sustainable Material for 3D Printing with Spent Coffee GroundsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3595983(294-311)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Functional Destruction: Utilizing Sustainable Materials’ Physical Transiency for Electronics ApplicationsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580811(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Strategies To Modify the Surface and Bulk Properties of 3D-Printed Solid Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering ApplicationsACS Omega10.1021/acsomega.2c059848:6(5139-5156)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
    • (2022)Shape from ReleaseACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3550454.355551841:6(1-14)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Ephemeral Fabrication: Exploring a Ubiquitous Fabrication Scenario of Low-Effort, In-Situ Creation of Short-Lived Physical ArtifactsProceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3490149.3501331(1-17)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2022
    • (2021)Study on Direct Writing of Gallium Metal for the Flexible SensorAdvances in Materials Science and Engineering10.1155/2021/99805342021(1-10)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
    • (2021)ShrinCage: 4D Printing Accessories that Self-AdaptProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445220(1-12)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2020)SimuLearnProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3379337.3415867(71-84)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2020
    • (2020)Programmable FilamentProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3379337.3415863(1209-1221)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2020

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