Fabricación digital directa para deportes y aplicaciones médicas: tres casos prácticos

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM), commonly called 3D

printing, is the process of making objects layer upon

layer from 3D model data in order to test design

prototypes (called Rapid Prototyping), to obtain

production tools (Rapid Tooling) or to build and then

use that prototype as a final part in the final product

(Direct Manufacturing). This paper aims to show

new applications of the Direct Digital Manufacturing

philosophy for sports and medical sciences. Particularly,

the aim of the study is to present three case-studies

that take advantage of AM so as to enable practitioners

and professional players to manufacture customised 1)

face masks to protect the face during sports or everyday

activities, 2) foot insoles to treat foot problems and 3)

shin pads to be worn by football players and shield them

from shin injuries.

In every case study, prior to fabrication, anthropometric

features of volunteer patients were captured by a low

cost 3D scanner and a user-friendly semi-automatic

modelling procedure was developed with Rhinoceros and

Grasshopper in order to model and customise several

features of the three products.

The resulting virtual designs of the three products were

manufactured with the help of four different AM devices

while design workflow and the suitability of the physical

prototypes were evaluated against volunteers and

practitioners. Feedback results from practitioners and

volunteers were satisfactory enough in order to consider

the design tools provided as a good starting point for

future developments.

Further work is still necessary in terms of improvement

to the design algorithm, inclusion of new materials

and test procedures to verify the physical prototypes

to the final user requirements. Nevertheless, this

work confirmed that the combination of existing

tools of three-dimensional digitisation, user-friendly

semi-automatic algorithm within a Computer Aided

Design (CAD) and Additive Manufacturing can lead to

a technologically feasible and cost-effective solution

to improve the traditional design and manufacturing

process of customised orthotic and protective devices for

sports and medical sciences.