3D printing dissolvable support material for time-dependent mechanisms

Abstract

In this thesis, a novel approach to the use of dissolvable material is proposed: rather than 3D printing support structures strictly for supporting overhangs, we explore use cases derived from its ability to be dissolved when placed in a solvent, such as water. This enables a range of new use cases, such as quickly dissolving and replacing parts of a prototype during design iteration, printing temporary assembly labels directly onto objects that leave no visual artifacts once dissolved, and creating time-dependent mechanisms, such as fading in parts of an image in a shadow art piece or releasing scents from a 3D printed structure sequentially overnight. We use commercially available support material, rendering the approach usable on consumer 3D printers without any further modifications. To facilitate the design of objects that leverage dissolvable support, a custom 3D editor plugin is built that includes a simulation showing how support material dissolves over time. In our evaluation, our simulation predicted geometries that are statistically similar to the physically dissolved samples within 10% error across all samples.