Rapid generation of uniform cellular structure by using prefabricated unit cells

Cellular structures are one of the effective ways to produce parts with higher resource efficiency by reducing material and time used. These complex structures can be built by using Additive Manufacturing (AM) which is hardly achievable by using traditional subtractive manufacturing. Cellular structures can be designed and modelled according to desired, specific properties. However, the modelling can be time and resource consuming, due to the complexity and the size of the structure. This article proposes a modelling technique for rapid generation of cellular structure. The method works based on a concept of a hybrid B-Rep and polygon approach. Prefabrication of unit cell kernels is introduced to shorten time in a populating phase, which results in a significant reduction of modelling time, especially for a structure with a large number of cells. The implementation of this method by using open-source library, Open Cascade Technology (OCCT) and Visualization Toolkits (VTK), is also presented.