Final milestone: the unit cell
In particular, the focus of the project partners over the past few months has been to iron out the fine details of the 3D printing process chain. With the resulting toolset, the support structures are now implicitly created. This means that in CATIA V5 a volume is created instead of the individual geometries. And the volume is attached to an attribute in the form of a color. The volume is only filled with the geometry of unit cells in one of the following steps. “The unit cells make it possible to freely develop the support geometry, without affecting the performance of the CAD system. What is possible now, for example, are graded support structures in various layers that can differ in their structure,” explains Jochen Michael the Innovation.
A unit cell can be imagined as a cube of any size, in which a geometry is generated. These unit cells are divided into layers. The color (attribute) is linked with the corresponding unit cell in the configuration file. The advantage: The unit cells are only created once and can be re-used as many times as you want. The slice data are stored in a neutral XML format. Then, in a last step, the post processor developed by CENIT is applied. It generates the specific data for the machine. It generates the paths that the laser passes through during the exposure process and fills the areas with prefabricated unit cells. “The actual final geometry is not created until this point”, explains Dr. Imgru.