COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN-TO-FABRICATION USING SPATIAL GRAMMARS: AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING PRINTABLE CAR WHEEL DESIGN VARIANTS
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Srinivasan Venkataraman
Author: Chen, Tian; Shea, Kristina
Series: ICED
Institution: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland
Section: Design Theory and Research Methodology, Design Processes
Page(s): 035-044
ISBN: 978-1-904670-65-0
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies offer new possibilities for engineers to fabricate designs that may not otherwise be possible or cost-effective with conventional methods. However, each process has constraints that must be adhered to and designers faced with such freedom do not readily explore the new search space offered. Computational design-to-fabrication, introduced in this paper, utilizes new AM opportunities by encoding the constraints of AM processes as well as considerations such as style and performance, into generative design systems that automatically generate designs that are directly printable. This paper presents the specific example of generating car wheel spoke variants using a set of 12 spatial grammar rules that conform to the DfAM constraints for the Fused Deposition Modeling printer UPrint SE Plus and FEM meshing and analysis requirements. From a set of 72,500 valid designs, 100 were generated automatically, 12 of which are fabricated. The results demonstrate the spatial grammar’s capability to automatically generate valid designs, both known and new to spark creativity, that can also be directly analyzed with FEM and fabricated using 3D printing.
Keywords: Computational Design Synthesis, Design For Additive Manufacturing, Spatial Grammar, Design Methods