Development of Intertwined Infills to Improve Multi-Material Interfacial Bond Strength

Recently, the availability of various materials and ongoing research in developing advanced systems for multi-material additive manufacturing (MMAM) have opened doors for innovation in functional products. One major concern of MMAM is the strength at the interface between materials. This article hypothesizes overlapping and interlacing materials to enhance the bonding strength. To test this hypothesis, we need a computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) tool that can process the overlapped material regions. However, existing computational tools lack key multi-material design processing features and have certain limitations in making full use of the material information, which restricts the testing of our hypothesis. Therefore, this research also develops a new MMAM slicing framework that efficiently identifies the boundaries for materials to develop different advanced features. By modifying a ray tracing technology, we develop layered-depth material images (LDMI) to process the material information from computer-aided design (CAD) models for slicing and process planning. Each sample point in the LDMI has associated material and geometric properties that are used to identify the multi-material regions. Based on the material information in each slice, interlocking joint (T-Joint) and interlacing infill are generated in the regions with multiple materials. Tensile tests have been performed to verify the enhancement of mechanical properties by the use of overlapping and interlacing materials.