Versatile volumetric additive manufacturing with 3D ray tracing

TL;DR

This paper introduces 3D ray tracing for tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing, significantly improving fidelity and build volume by accounting for optical system properties often ignored by traditional methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel 3D ray tracing approach for calculating projections in VAM, enabling higher fidelity and larger build volumes compared to the Radon transform method.

Findings

3X increase in vertical build volume

High fidelity printing in non-telecentric systems

Expanded printing configurations for faster and cheaper production

Abstract

Tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) is an optical 3D printing technique where an object is formed by photopolymerizing resin via tomographic projections. Currently, these projections are calculated using the Radon transform from computed tomography but it ignores two fundamental properties of real optical projection systems: finite etendue and non-telecentricity. In this work, we introduce 3D ray tracing as a new method of computing projections in tomographic VAM and demonstrate high fidelity printing in non-telecentric and higher etendue systems, leading to a 3X increase in vertical build volume than the standard Radon method. The method introduced here expands the possible tomographic VAM printing configurations, enabling faster, cheaper, and higher fidelity printing.