Last week, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) presented “Foundry,” a design program that can customize a variety of 3-D printed objects with composite materials.
As MIT Ph.D student Kiril Vidimče explains, in traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process. Parts can be designed with traditional CAD (computer-aided-design) systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part. However, with Foundry, users can tailor the material properties with a level of detail that wasn’t possible until now.
“It’s like Photoshop for 3-D materials, allowing you to design objects made of new composite materials that have the optimal mechanical, thermal, and conductive properties that you need for a given task,” says Vidimče. “You are only constrained by your creativity and your ideas on how to combine materials in novel ways.”
