High fidelity volumetric additive manufacturing
Indrasen Bhattacharya, Joseph Toombs, Hayden Taylor
Abstract
Volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) promises a significantly improved regime of capabilities for 3D printing. Computed Axial Lithography (CAL) is a photopolymerization-based tomographic VAM process which constructs objects by projecting systematic illumination patterns into a container of photosensitive prepolymer as it rotates. This technique is used to demonstrate the manufacturing of parts that faithfully adhere to respective target geometries. A principled optimization approach is used to generate the illumination patterns by penalizing 3D dose constraint violations and is demonstrated to achieve better performance than a heuristic dose matching technique. 3D objects are experimentally fabricated using CAL, and excellent fidelity to target design is demonstrated on diverse exemplary geometries. Imperfections between design and resulting print are experimentally characterized using laser scanning measurements. Deviations below 1.05 mm are achieved (max standard deviation = 0.22 mm, absolute max mean deviation = 0.15 mm) on complex objects with extent of 20–40 mm that are all fabricated volumetrically in minutes.