Generation of patterned indentations for additive manufacturing technologies

This article proposes a novel approach to generate patterned indentations for different additive manufacturing methodologies. Surface textures have many practical applications in various fields, but require special manufacturing considerations. In addition to conventional manufacturing processes, additive processes have also been utilized in the last decade to obtain textured surfaces. The current design and fabrication pipeline of additive manufacturing operations have many disadvantages in that respect. For instance, the size of the design (CAD) files grows considerably when there are detailed indentations on the surfaces of the artifacts. The presented method, which employs morphological operations on a sequence of binary images representing the cross-sections of the printed artefact, overcomes such problems while fabricating the textured objects. Furthermore, the presented technique could be conveniently implemented using the existing hardware resources of almost any three-dimensional printer.