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Graded Formations
Graded Formations is an additive manufacturing process that utilizes the benefits of printing with liquid materials and a novel digital design and fabrication workflow to create objects with continuous material property gradients, inspired by the logic of natural systems. A simple, scalable hardware setup and custom open-source software development are synthesized to allow the designer control of material property distribution throughout an object. This process implements an unified extrusion tip where different liquid materials can be dynamically mixed according to an assigned material ratio. The established workflow proposes a graphical input of color gradients to assist this material attribution, as well as methods that allow the inclusion of fabrication parameters during the design process, allowing the designer to intuitively combine different material properties and take advantage of the fluidic characteristics of the material. Biohydrogel prototypes that feature pre-programmed deformation according to their patterned stiffness gradients are printed as demonstrators of the developed process.
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In collaboration with Pedro Giachini
Example of a linear gradient print created with the developed fabrication process
Aqueous mixtures of cellulose are extruded through a syringe and solidify into hydrogels with free-form geometries
A computational tool was developed to calculate an optimized fabrication path based on an input gradient design
Communication and design-to-fabrication workflow was developed in Grasshopper with custom C# scripts.
Multiple methods of creating stiffness gradients using fluidic properties was achieved and included in the generation of fabrication data
Gradients could be designed using a bitmap image with the color value converted to a 'material ratio' that designated the amount of each material to be mixed during an fabrication step
