Digital Materials

Project Members: Jonathan Hiller

Imagine a desktop fabricator capable of making perfectly repeatable, arbitrary, multi material 3D objects with microscale precision.

Overview

In the digital domain, a 3D object is composed of repeating, fundamental building blocks known as voxels. Each voxel location is either occupied (1) or not (0), so 3D space is digital (discrete) instead of analog (continuous). All current manufacturing processes (even digitally controlled CNC machines) are fundamentally analog. Over the past several decades, the transition from analog to digital has revolutionized many fields, most notably computing and communication. Many of the advantages gained here translate to digital matter, such as perfect repeatability with no noise and better precision than the assembly machine. However, a finite resolution must be chosen, and processing time increases.

Digital Fabrication: Voxels of multiple materials are autonomously assembled

Digital manufacturing is inspired from biology, where DNA, amino acids, and proteins all illustrate systems where a digital structure is formed from a discreet number of aligned, fundamental building blocks. Since the voxels must self-align and interlock with those around them, the overall accuracy is determined by the individual voxels, which can be made very precisely using microfabrication techniques. This phenomenon is analogous to a child (with ~1mm finger positioning accuracy) assembling a Lego(TM) structure with 5 micron precision. Inherent to the success of this technology is a fabricator that can rapidly assemble millions of voxels in a parallel, top-down approach. This deterministic control allows completely arbitrary 3D multi-material microfabrication.

Publications

Hiller, J., Lipson, H., (2009) "Design and analysis of digital materials for physical 3D voxel printing", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 137-149.

Hiller J., Lipson H., (2008) “Tunable Digital Material Properties for 3D Voxel Printers”, Proceedings of the 19th Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin TX, Aug 2008.

Hiller J., Lipson H., (2007) “Methods of Parallel Voxel Manipulation for 3D Digital Printing”, Proceedings of the 18th Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin TX, Aug 2007, pp. 200-211.