Heterogeneous Material-Based Product Modelling

With the advances in material engineering and the Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology, product design and realization are experiencing dramatic paradigm shifts. The new trend is that designers work with material scientists more cooperatively to tailor material compositions/structures to achieve desirable properties and to exhibit better performance than those products using other available materials. In this paper, research on heterogeneous (HE) material-based product modeling is reported. To better represent various HE material-based product models, a set of NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Spline) and HE material-based design features have been developed. The features are not only suitable for regular shapes, but also extensible for non-regular and complex shapes. Algorithms for linear and non-linear transition between HE materials have been embedded in the features to enable users to address the functional needs. Another characteristic of the features is that geometrical variables have been used to model HE materials to improve their computation and processing efficiency in RP. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the research for complex products, a case study to develop a HE material-based bone implant is reported to explain the modeling process.