Video. Jue Chair's design process
Abstract
Jue Chair is a fusion of cultural elegance and modern design. Its design was inspired by the ancient Chinese wine utensil, Jue, and the bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization method. This chair showcases a lightweight yet strong structure. It achieves a substantial 73% reduction in volume while preserving its strength and ensuring minimal deformation (within 0.3 mm). The futuristic form and smooth surface highlight its aesthetic appeal. Made using 3D printing technology, the Jue Chair is a cost-effective, innovative blend of tradition and future style.
Introduction
Furniture plays a significant role in our daily life. Advanced computational and manufacturing technologies provide new opportunities to create novel, high-performance and customised furniture. This project aims to design and manufacture a novel chair using topology optimisation and additive manufacturing. The chair, named Jue Chair, combines Chinese triditonal culture with the latest technology and won the third prize in the International 3D Printing and Design Competition.
Figure 1. A chair designed and manufactured by Prof Mike Xie’s team using the BESO method and 3D printing technology (credits: Albert Li, Jiaming Ma and Mike Xie)
The inspiration of the Jue chair comes from an ancient Chinese wine utensil, Jue. It was used to hold and heat wine during ceremonies and celebrations. Mentally, Jue was a symbol of prestige, and it revealed the noble status of the owner. Therefore, we chose Jue as a concept guide in our design.
At the conceptual design stage, we paid attention to the relationship between the leaf-shaped edge and the two columns of Jue, which can be abstracted into an essential pattern for further design. Then, we reconstructed the geometric pattern by some subjective operations. At the meantime, ergonomics was also considered in this stage to ensure comfort and safety. For example, the angle between the seat and back is designed to be 110 degrees, which can help to reduce the pressure on the user’s waist. Finally, we designed an initial model that can express Jue's noble symbol.
In the next step, we used the BESO topology optimisation algorithm to generate a lightweight design with optimised structure performance. We first designed the load conditions on each part of the chair based on an 80 kg adult male. And then, supports, non-design domain, and symmetry boundary conditions were applied to the model. After 280 iterations, the result required only 27% of material volume compared to the initial volume. The whole process was realised through Ameba, a topology optimisation software developed by XIE Technologies. Moreover, we used our Ameba remeshing function to optimise the geometrical model to improve the surface quality and support manufacturing. And then, we converted the mesh model into a NURBS model to complete the entire product design. After that, we obtain a delicate and smooth model that supports subsequent works.
Next, we did a finite element analysis to verify the structural performance of the Jue Chair. As can be seen, the stress is uniformly distributed through the chair and the displacement is very small.
For the manufacturing part, we employted the large-scale FDM printing method and PLA plus as material for production. Considering the allowable printing size of 3d printers, we split the chair into 6 parts with a lot of connection nodes. In this way, we achieved a balance among fabrication limitation, structural performance as well as costs. To further enhance the appearance and sense of touch, the chair was carefully sanded, polished, and sprayed.
Compared with the traditional furniture design and manufacturing, our workflow combines computer graphics, topology optimisation with advanced manufacturing. It consists of the initial design, the topology optimisation method, the postprocessing of the optimised results, and the physical prototypes’ manufacturing and surface treatment.
The topology optimisation technique helps us save 73% of material usage, which is equivalent to saving almost 8 thousand Australian dollars. In terms of fabrication technology, the usage of large-scale FDM 3d printing allowed us to design and manufacture a chair with complicated and bionic shapes.
Comments