Novel Honeycomb Infill Fabrication Pattern for Additive Manufacturing

In additive manufacturing (AM), porous structures are often used as infills to reduce the build time and cost. However, providing physical stability to the skin and mechanical integrity to the object is a functional requirement for any infill pattern. Prismatic closed cells, i.e. honeycomb structure, are often used as infill in AM parts. These cells are periodic in nature and uniform in density. In this research, a new fabrication pattern for honeycomb infill is proposed for additive manufacturing applications. The proposed pattern can accommodate controllable variational honeycomb infill while maintaining continuity with relative ease. First, the honeycomb unit cell geometry is defined for uniform and non-uniform voxel size. A continuous tool-path is then designed to achieve the honeycomb structure. Finally, the structures are fabricated with the variational and uniform pattern and are then compared to the traditional pattern using compression testing. The results show that the proposed designs perform better under compression load and can absorb more energy compared to the traditional counterpart.