Abstract
Current Computer Aided Design systems are boundary structure based, and represent objects by their inner and outer hulls. This approach is well suited for object with homogenous material. Additive manufacturing allows the manufacturing of objects with variable material, and complex inner structures. Such objects are impossible to represent by boundary structures. In additive manufacturing cost and manufacturing time is linked to the amount of material used. Designs reducing material use, e.g., weight reducing inner structures, are very attractive. A new generation of simulation and optimization based design tools is needed to support design for additive manufacturing. This relates both to design methods and the shape representations. There is a need for moving from a 2-variate representation of the surfaces of the objects, to a 3-variate representation that includes variable properties of the interior of the object, possibly combined with a procedural type representation of the nonhomogeneous object interior. These representations have to go beyond the volumetric spline representations of Isogeometric Analysis. The talk will include the approaches selected in the Horizon 2020 R&I-project www.caxman.eu addressing computer aided technologies of additive manufacturing.
