Graded BioPolymer 3d Printing

BioPol is part of an 18 million DKK ERC grant for the study of "Eco-Metabolistic Architecture" using biogenic materials. Comprising a series of investigations into modeling, fabricating, and monitoring naturally biodegradable biopolymer composites, the project provokes the question, what if our buildings were designed not to last?

While at the Royal Danish Academy's Center for Information Technology and Architecture I have contributed to their research in advanced volumetric modeling. Using OpenVDB software and general purpose GPU programming (GPGPU) to handle the vast quantities of data, we created complex forms for biopolymer 3d printing with graded properties. The Rhizaerial demonstrator, a suspended triple barrel vault robotically printed from collagen glue and bio-based binders, represents a new step within the BioPol project and the first large-scale physical prototype of these efforts during my tenure.

Voxel-based modeling is ideally suited to multimaterial printing, where many layers of data such as material, color, heat, speed, and so forth must be spatially registered. Furthermore, voxel models' robustness to topological changes solves perennial issues of maintaining watertight and manifold meshes in surface-based modeling approaches. A particular and ongoing area of interest has been adapting 2d graphics algorithms such as distance and medial axis transforms to solve complex problems in voxel space.
Credits:
  • Mette Ramsgaard-Thomsen
  • Paul Nicholas
  • Gabriella Rossi
  • Carl Eppinger
  • Konrad Sonne
  • Shahriar Akbari