Innovative Design and Fabrication Environment for Robotic Additive Manufacturing of Sustainable Sandwich Structures

This study focuses on developing an innovative design and fabrication environment for the robotic additive manufacturing of sustainable sandwich structures made from thermoplastic polymers. The objective is to demonstrate how digital twins for the design and manufacturing processes can effectively support creating sustainable structural core solutions for sandwich panels. The research involves the development of a design environment for sandwich structures, based on a multi-objective optimisation framework and of a robotic additive manufacturing simulation environment, based on off-line programming techniques, to assess the production feasibility of the design. The potential of these tools for creating innovative core solutions and materials is initially evaluated by designing various core topologies made from eco-sustainable thermoplastics. We then compare their compressive structural performance with traditional thermoplastic core materials used in the marine, aerospace, and automotive industries.