SIGGRAPH 2025 
(ACM Transaction on Graphics)

Neural Co-Optimization of Structural Topology, Manufacturable Layers, and Path Orientations for Fiber​-Reinforced Composites

Tao Liu*, Tianyu Zhang*, Yongxue Chen, Weiming Wang,  Yu Jiang, Yuming Huang, and Charlie C.L. Wang†

*Joint first authors        
†Corresponding author

We propose a neural network-based computational framework for the simultaneous optimization of structural topology, curved layers, and path orientations to achieve strong anisotropic strength in fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites while ensuring manufacturability. Our framework employs three implicit neural fields to represent geometric shape, layer sequence, and fiber orientation. This enables the direct formulation of both design and manufacturability objectives -- such as anisotropic strength, structural volume, machine motion control, layer curvature, and layer thickness -- into an integrated and differentiable optimization process. By incorporating these objectives as loss functions, the framework ensures that the resultant composites exhibit optimized mechanical strength while remaining its manufacturability for filament-based multi-axis 3D printing across diverse hardware platforms. Physical experiments demonstrate that the composites generated by our co-optimization method can achieve an improvement of up to $33.1\%$ in failure loads compared to composites with sequentially optimized structures and manufacturing sequences.

An overview of our slicing framework for co-optimization of the design and manufacturing constrains of multi-axis 3D printing.

The ​sequential results of different volume fraction by our framework.

Contact information: 
Tao Liu  (tao.liu@manchester.ac.uk)
Tianyu Zhang  (tianyu.zhang@manchester.ac.uk)
Charlie C.L. Wang  (changling.wang@manchester.ac.uk)