Porous scaffold design by solid T-splines and triply periodic minimal surfaces

By Jiawei Feng, Jianzhong Fu, Ce Shang, Zhiwei Lin, Bin Li. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 2018

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Due to its high interconnectivity and smooth surface, the triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) has become a promising porous structure applied as tissue engineering scaffold, lightweight filling and micro-reactor. Yet, it is still a tough challenge to meet the authentic flexible demands by current TPMS design methods. In this work, a complete TPMS porous scaffold design method based on solid T-splines is proposed. In order to give full play to advantages of TPMS, the parameter influences on the volume specific surface area and porosity are analyzed, respectively. Then, a novel solid T-spline based heterogeneous porous scaffold design solution is offered, including TPMS scaffolds with non-uniform threshold, period and unit. Initially, a complex solid T-spline model can be approximately represented by sampled hexahedron elements. Eventually, these sampled hexahedron elements are redivided into tetrahedrons for TPMS extraction by the Marching tetrahedra algorithm. The information for designing TPMS, including the external volume, internal unit parameters can be represented via solid T-splines. The TPMS can be directly extracted from the solid T-spline designed volume which is homeomorphic to a cube. The final TPMS scaffold is saved as STL model and manufactured via additive manufacturing technology. Experimental results support the effectiveness as well as the flexibility of this solid T-spline based TPMS scaffold design method.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71b8a21b9d593db03892f89c86dbf3ba4b3fd9d6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

1. Xinhua Yao
2. Yong He
3. Jianzhong Fu
4. Jiawei Feng

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Yong He
2. Xinhua Yao
3. Jianzhong Fu
4. Jiawei Feng

Citations in the corpus

• Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) porous structures: from multi-scale design, precise additive manufacturing to multidisciplinary applications (2022, methodology): “In order to mimic natural porous structures and to fulfill demands of diverse applications, graded TPMS [13, 14], heterogeneous TPMS [9, 15–18], multiscale TPMS [19–22], and TPMS with complex external shapes [9, 23, 24] were designed.”