3D printing using only binary tensors representing parts

Question

I need to 3D print several composites. The constituent materials are photopolymer resins. The composites are very similar to a Rubik's cube. Considering it that way, each voxel (every small piece of the Rubik's cube) is either entirely printed by material A or B.

I have the binary files ready for the parts. More specifically speaking, I have 3D binary tensors corresponding to each composite topology. In my tensors, each of the elements represents a voxel, and their values (binary) indicate the material that should be assigned to that specific voxel. For instance, a 1 or 0 value located at the I, J, K position of the binary tensor simply means that in that composite, the voxel located at that I, J, K position should be printed with material A or B entirely.

I believe for 3D printing these composites, the Stratasys Objet500 Connex3 printer would be a good choice. However, I have no idea how to prepare my files for 3D printing the structures. If it was a CAD file, I could use slicer software, but I do not know how I can print the structures using these binary tensors. I would appreciate any help regarding this matter.

Answer 1

It appears that your question is directed to solving the problem of converting your file of parameters to a 3D printable form. I'm far from an OpenSCAD wizard, but I suspect that your parameters file could be read into a properly coded OpenSCAD document to create the necessary STL to be printed.

Your reference of I, J, K is better considered as X, Y, Z and requires an additional value to determine material A, B or nul. If your voxels are uniform size as I expect, the coding is likely not to be particularly complex (for more skilled individuals).

pseudocode:

read entry
translate by x, y, z
check for print material a
create voxel
repeat to EOF
export STL

repeat for material b

It's important to note that a typical STL file requires the object to be a fully manifold creation. If the STL appears, for example, as a QR code, some of the voxels will be floating and may not produce. This is also dependent on the printer selected, as an SLS printer would be able to produce such a design, which would fall apart once removed from the print chamber. These are aspects not covered in the question.

Answer 2

Stratasys industrial machines generally use proprietary software to prepare the print files for printing and don't use common slicers like Ultimaker Cura or Prusa-slicer.

The software that is suggested by the manufacturer for both arranging and preparing prints on their machines of the Objet type is GrabCAD, a free software. The project is owned by Stratasys, so it is pretty much on point to all of Stratasys' machine's capabilities.