Organic Open-cell Porous Structure Modeling

Open-cell porous structures are ubiquitous in nature and have been widely employed in practical applications. Additive manufacturing has enabled the fabrication of shapes with intricate interior structures; however, a computational method for representing and modeling general porous structures in organic shapes is missing in the literature. In this paper, we present a novel method for modeling organic and open-cell porous structures with porosities and pore anisotropies specified by users or stipulated by applications. We represent each pore as a transformed Gaussian kernel whose anisotropy is defined by a tensor field. The porous structure is modeled as a level surface of combined Gaussian kernels. We utilize an anisotropic particle system to distribute the Gaussian kernels concerning the input tensor field. The porous structure is then generated from the particle system by following the anisotropy specified by the input. We employ Morse-Smale complexes to identify the topological structure of the kernels and enforce pore connectivity. The resulting porous structure can be easily controlled using a set of parameters. We demonstrate our method on a set of 3D models whose tensor field is either predesigned or obtained from the mechanical analysis.