Coreform LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 04a

Description

Advancements are rapidly being made to enable additive manufacturing workflows in a growing number of applications. 3D printing manufacturing processes, materials, and design software are all markedly more advanced than they were even a year ago, and are now mature enough to manufacture lightweight parts comprised of intricate lattice structures of over 10M cells. However, structural simulation capabilities for these lattice structures are lagging seriously behind; for instance, it remains impossible to predict critical phenomena such as stress concentrations and buckling on lattice structures over 10,000 cells. This lack of predictive capability is preventing the full harnessing of 3D printing by critical industries such as aerospace and defense. A first-of-its-kind isogeometric solver, currently under development, can run highly accurate simulations directly on arbitrary inputs, such as computer-aided design (CAD) files or scanned data, without creating a conforming mesh. This SBIR will extend this technique to work directly on implicit lattice structures, leveraging the industry’s first GPU-accelerated CAD kernel. This will result in near real-time modeling, simulation, and slicing software for additive manufacturing, leveraging GPUs to be able to handle 10M or even 100M cell count lattice structures designed in the future. In Phase I, the GPU-accelerated kernel will be integrated into a preprocessor. Next, a GPU- accelerated implicit lattice CAD definition will be developed and integrated with patent- pending isogeometric analysis technology. Finally, a benchmark structural simulation will be run on a 50K cell lattice structure, which is 10x larger than the size currently possible with commercial software. The success of Phase I will establish the ability of isogeometric analysis techniques to successfully simulate large lattice structures that cannot be simulated by any other available method. In Phase II and beyond, these capabilities will be further developed with input from 3D-printing users to refine them for industry needs. When fully developed, this project will allow industry users to significantly decrease their dependence on physical prototyping. Cars, boats, airplanes, and other fueled vehicles will be constructed using lightweight lat- tice structures, meaning they weigh less and consume less fuel. Low-volume parts, such as airplane components, are extremely expensive to produce using traditional manufacturing methods, but can be 3D printed for little more than design and material costs. We anticipate not only an explosion in the volume of parts and components that can be 3D printed once computer simulation is possible, but also an increase in innovation and creativity leading to entirely new and unanticipated categories of 3D printing.