Three-Dimensionally Printed Ternary Composites of Polyamide: Effect of Gradient Structure on Dimensional Stability and Mechanical Properties.

Fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing has the advantages of a simple molding principle, convenient operation, and low cost, making it suitable for the production and fabrication of complex structural parts. Moving forward to mass production using 3D printing, the major hurdle to overcome is the achievement of high dimensional stability and adequate mechanical properties. In particular, engineering plastics require precise dimensional accuracy. In this study, we overcame the issues of FDM 3D printing in terms of ternary material compounds for polyamides with gradient structures. Using multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and boron nitride (BN) as fillers, polyamide 6 (PA6)-based 3D-printed parts with high dimensional stability were prepared using a single-nozzle, two-component composite fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing technology to construct a gradient structure. The ternary composites were characterized via DSC and XRD to determine the optimal crystallinity. The warpage and shrinkage of the printed samples were measured to ensure the dimensional properties. The mechanical properties were analyzed to determine the influence of the gradient structures on the composites. The experimental results show that the warpage of pure polymer 3D-printed parts is as high as 72.64%, and the introduction of a gradient structure can reduce the warpage to 3.40% by offsetting the shrinkage internal stress between layers. In addition, the tensile strength of the gradient material reaches up to 42.91 MPa, and the increasing filler content improves the interlayer bonding of the composites, with the bending strength reaching up to 60.91 MPa and the interlayer shear strength reaching up to 10.23 MPa. Therefore, gradient structure design can be used to produce PA6 3D-printed composites with high dimensional stability without sacrificing the mechanical properties of PA6 composites.

Large-scale-adaptive fringe projection 3D measurement.

Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) faces significant challenges regarding calibration difficulty and stitching error accumulation when operating across scenes ranging from tens to hundreds of meters. This Letter presents a calibration-free 3D measurement method by integrating a binocular vision of a FPP scanner with a wide field-of-view (FoV) vision that constructs global benchmarks to unify local 3D scanning and global 3D stitching, which is adaptable to arbitrarily large-scale scenes. A posterior global optimization model is then established to determine the reconstruction parameters and stitching poses simultaneously at each scanning node with adaptively distributed benchmarks. Consequently, the integrated vision measurement system not only eliminates the large-scale pre-calibration and stitching error accumulation but also overcomes system structural instability during moving measurement. With the proposed method, we achieved 3D measurements with an accuracy of 0.25 mm and a density of 0.5 mm for over 50-m-long scenes.

Phase-aided online self-correction method for high-accuracy three-dimensional measurement.

The binocular structured light 3D measurement system is widely used in situ industrial inspection and shape measurement, where the system structure is generally unstable due to mechanical loosening or environmental disturbance. Timely corrections to the changing structural parameters thus is an essential task for online high-accuracy measurement, which is difficult for traditional unidirectional fringe projection methods to self-correct the structural change. To this end, we propose an online self-correction method based on the investigation that orthogonal fringe projection can intrinsically relax the constraint on the epipolar geometry relationship and provide bidirectional phases for accurate corresponding point searching. Since orthogonal fringe projection may sacrifice the measurement efficiency, we further design a searching strategy by locally unwrapping one directional phase to reduce the number of projection patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for online self-correction of unstable system structure to achieve high-accuracy 3D measurement under complex measurement environments.

Phase-unwrapping-free 3D reconstruction in structured light field system based on varied auxiliary point.

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is an essential task in structured light field (SLF) related techniques and applications. This paper presents a new method to reconstruct a 3D object point by using many auxiliary points adjacent to it. The relationship between two points in a SLF system is derived. Different from conventional "direct" methods that reconstruct 3D coordinates of the object point by using phase, slope, disparity etc., the proposed method is an "indirect" method as the 3D coordinates of auxiliary points are not needed. Based on the auxiliary point theory, the wrapped phase obtained by 4-step phase-shifting method is sufficient for 3D reconstruction, without the need for phase unwrapping. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first strategy that combines the intrinsic characteristics of structured light and light field for phase-unwrapping-free 3D reconstruction. This paper also analyzes the constraints between system architecture parameters and phase rectification, phase to depth ratio, and presents a relatively simple criterion to guide the system design. Experimental results show that, with an appropriate system architecture, the proposed method can realize accurate, unambiguous, and reliable 3D reconstruction without phase unwrapping.

Progress of Polymer-Based Thermally Conductive Materials by Fused Filament Fabrication: A Comprehensive Review.

With the miniaturization and integration of electronic products, the heat dissipation efficiency of electronic equipment needs to be further improved. Notably, polymer materials are a choice for electronic equipment matrices because of their advantages of low cost and wide application availability. However, the thermal conductivity of polymers is insufficient to meet heat dissipation requirements, and their improvements remain challenging. For decades, as an efficient manufacturing technology, additive manufacturing has gradually attracted public attention, and researchers have also used this technology to produce new thermally conductive polymer materials. Here, we review the recent research progress of different 3D printing technologies in heat conduction and the thermal conduction mechanism of polymer matrix composites. Based on the classification of fillers, the research progress of thermally conductive materials prepared by fused filament fabrication (FFF) is discussed. It analyzes the internal relationship between FFF process parameters and the thermal conductivity of polymer matrix composites. Finally, this study summarizes the application and future development direction of thermally conductive composites by FFF.

Progress in the Preparation, Properties, and Applications of PLA and Its Composite Microporous Materials by Supercritical CO2: A Review from 2020 to 2022.

The development of degradable plastic foams is in line with the current development concept of being pollution free and sustainable. Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) microporous foam with biodegradability, good heat resistance, biocompatibility, and mechanical properties can be successfully applied in cushioning packaging, heat insulation, noise reduction, filtration and adsorption, tissue engineering, and other fields. This paper summarizes and critically evaluates the latest research on preparing PLA microporous materials by supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) physical foaming since 2020. This paper first introduces the scCO2 foaming technologies for PLA and its composite foams, discusses the CO2-assisted foaming processes, and analyzes the effects of process parameters on PLA foaming. After that, the paper reviews the effects of modification methods such as chemical modification, filler filling, and mixing on the rheological and crystallization behaviors of PLA and provides an in-depth analysis of the mechanism of PLA foaming behavior to provide theoretical guidance for future research on PLA foaming. Lastly, the development and applications of PLA microporous materials based on scCO2 foaming technologies are prospected.

Lensless light-field imaging through diffuser encoding.

Microlens array-based light-field imaging has been one of the most commonly used and effective technologies to record high-dimensional optical signals for developing various potential high-performance applications in many fields. However, the use of a microlens array generally suffers from an intrinsic trade-off between the spatial and angular resolutions. In this paper, we concentrate on exploiting a diffuser to explore a novel modality for light-field imaging. We demonstrate that the diffuser can efficiently angularly couple incident light rays into a detected image without needing any lens. To characterize and analyse this phenomenon, we establish a diffuser-encoding light-field transmission model, in which four-dimensional light fields are mapped into two-dimensional images via a transmission matrix describing the light propagation through the diffuser. Correspondingly, a calibration strategy is designed to flexibly determine the transmission matrix, so that light rays can be computationally decoupled from a detected image with adjustable spatio-angular resolutions, which are unshackled from the resolution limitation of the sensor. The proof-of-concept approach indicates the possibility of using scattering media for lensless four-dimensional light-field recording and processing, not just for two- or three-dimensional imaging.

Single-shot structured-light-field three-dimensional imaging.

This Letter reports an approach to single-shot three-dimensional (3D) imaging that is combining structured illumination and light-field imaging. The sinusoidal distribution of the radiance in the structured-light field can be processed and transformed to compute the angular variance of the local radiance difference. The angular variance across the depth range exhibits a single-peak distribution trend that can be used to obtain the unambiguous depth. The phase computation that generally requires the acquisition of multi-frame phase-shifting images is no longer mandatory, thus enabling single-shot structured-light-field 3D imaging. The proposed approach was experimentally demonstrated through a dynamic scene.

Light-field depth estimation considering plenoptic imaging distortion.

Light-field imaging can simultaneously record spatio-angular information of light rays to carry out depth estimation via depth cues which reflect a coupling of the angular information and the scene depth. However, the unavoidable imaging distortion in a light-field imaging system has a side effect on the spatio-angular coordinate computation, leading to incorrectly estimated depth maps. Based on the previously established unfocused plenoptic metric model, this paper reports a study on the effect of the plenoptic imaging distortion on the light-field depth estimation. A method of light-field depth estimation considering the plenoptic imaging distortion is proposed. Besides, the accuracy analysis of the light-field depth estimation was performed by using standard components. Experimental results demonstrate that efficiently compensating the plenoptic imaging distortion results in a six-fold improvement in measuring accuracy and more consistency across the measuring depth range. Consequently, the proposed method is proved to be suitable for light-field depth estimation and three-dimensional measurement with high quality, enabling unfocused plenoptic cameras to be metrological tools in the potential application scenarios such as industry, biomedicine, entertainment, and many others.

Unfocused plenoptic metric modeling and calibration.

For unfocused plenoptic imaging systems, metric calibration is generally mandatory to achieve high-quality imaging and metrology. In this paper, we present an explicit derivation of an unfocused plenoptic metric model associating a measured light field in the object space with a recorded light field in the image space to conform physically to the imaging properties of unfocused plenoptic cameras. In addition, the impact of unfocused plenoptic imaging distortion on depth computation was experimentally explored, revealing that radial distortion parameters contain depth-dependent common factors, which were then modeled as depth distortions. Consequently, a complete unfocused plenoptic metric model was established by combining the explicit metric model with the imaging distortion model. A three-step unfocused plenoptic metric calibration strategy, in which the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is used for parameter optimization, is correspondingly proposed to determine 12 internal parameters for each microlens unit. Based on the proposed modeling and calibration, the depth measurement precision can be increased to 0.25 mm in a depth range of 300 mm, ensuring the potential applicability of consumer unfocused plenoptic cameras in high-accuracy three-dimensional measurement.

Accurate depth estimation in structured light fields.

Passive light field imaging generally uses depth cues that depend on the image structure to perform depth estimation, causing robustness and accuracy problems in complex scenes. In this study, the commonly used depth cues, defocus and correspondence, were analyzed by using phase encoding instead of the image structure. The defocus cue obtained by spatial variance is insensitive to the global spatial monotonicity of the phase-encoded field. In contrast, the correspondence cue is sensitive to the angular variance of the phase-encoded field, and the correspondence responses across the depth range have single-peak distributions. Based on this analysis, a novel active light field depth estimation method is proposed by directly using the correspondence cue in the structured light field to search for non-ambiguous depths, and thus no optimization is required. Furthermore, the angular variance can be weighted to reduce the depth estimation uncertainty according to the phase encoding information. The depth estimation of an experimental scene with rich colors demonstrated that the proposed method could distinguish different depth regions in each color segment more clearly, and was substantially improved in terms of phase consistency compared to the passive method, thus verifying its robustness and accuracy.

Light-field-based absolute phase unwrapping.

Ambiguity caused by a wrapped phase is an intrinsic problem in fringe projection-based 3D shape measurement. Among traditional methods for avoiding phase ambiguity, spatial phase unwrapping is sensitive to sensor noise and depth discontinuity, and temporal phase unwrapping requires additional encoding information that leads to an increase of image sequence acquisition time or a reduction of fringe contrast. Here, to the best of our knowledge, we report a novel method of absolute phase unwrapping based on light field imaging. In a recorded light field under structured illumination, i.e., a structured light field, a wrapped phase-encoded field can be retrieved and resampled in diverse image planes associated with several possible fringe orders in a measurement volume. Then, by leveraging phase consistency constraint in the resampled wrapped phase-encoded field, correct fringe orders can be determined to unwrap the wrapped phase without any additional encoding information. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was suitable for accurate and robust absolute phase unwrapping.

Light field 3D measurement using unfocused plenoptic cameras.

This Letter reports a novel method to establish the metric relationship of depth value between object space and image space for unfocused plenoptic cameras. A three-dimensional (3D) measurement system was introduced to precisely construct benchmarks and matching features to compute the metric depths in the object space and the corresponding depth values in the image space for metric calibration. After metric calibration, precise measurement of the depth dimension was possible. Furthermore, with the aid of metric spatio-angular parameters determined via light field ray calibration, transverse dimensions were computed from the measured depth, realizing light field 3D measurement for unfocused plenoptic cameras. Finally, we experimentally performed accuracy analysis of the proposed method with depth measurement precision of 0.5 mm in a depth range of 300 mm, which illuminated potential applications of unfocused plenoptic cameras in the field of 3D measurement.

Suppression of the nonlinear phase error in phase shifting profilometry: considering non-smooth reflectivity and fractional period.

Hilbert transform (HT) has been employed to compensate phase error arising from the nonlinear effect in phase shifting profilometry (PSP). However, in most common situations, pure HT may lead to a significant system error, which has a negative impact on subsequent phase error compensation. In this paper, system error from HT of non-stationary and non-continuous fringe is analyzed, and then a novel phase error suppression approach is presented. The cosine fringe without direct current (DC) component is reconstructed to eliminate the influence of non-smooth reflectivity, and the fractional periods at both ends of the reconstructed fringe are extended to generate fringe with integer number of periods. And then the HT is applied to the reconstructed and extended fringe. Finally, a revised phase-shifting algorithm is employed to calculate the phase with the fringe after HT. The proposed approach is suitable for PSP of the surface with non-smooth reflectivity (e.g. texture of complex colors), which is demonstrated in a series of experiments.

Ray calibration and phase mapping for structured-light-field 3D reconstruction.

In previous work, we presented a structured light field (SLF) method combining light field imaging with structured illumination to perform multi-view depth measurement. However, the previous work just accomplishes depth rather than 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a novel active method involving ray calibration and phase mapping, to achieve SLF 3D reconstruction. We performed the ray calibration for the first time to determine each light field ray with metric spatio-angular parameters, making the SLF realize multi-view 3D reconstruction. Based on the ray parametric equation, we further derived the phase mapping in the SLF that spatial coordinates can be directly mapped from phase. A flexible calibration strategy was correspondently designed to determine mapping coefficients for each light field ray, achieving high-efficiency SLF 3D reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was suitable for high-efficiency multi-view 3D reconstruction in the SLF.

Universal phase-depth mapping in a structured light field.

Technologies and devices for light field imaging have recently been developed for both industrial applications and scientific research to achieve excellent imaging properties. In our previous work, we combined light field imaging with structured illumination to propose a structured light field method in which multidirectional depth estimation can be performed for high-quality 3D imaging. However, the projection axis was implicitly assumed to be perpendicular to the reference plane, which is hard to meet in practice. In this paper, we derive a universal phase-depth mapping in a structured light field by relaxing this implicit condition. Both nonlinear and linear models were proposed based on this universal relationship. To test the model's practical performance, we simulated experiments by adding errors to the real measured values to evaluate the deviation in depth estimation. By comparing the root-mean-square distributions of the depth deviations with respect to the depth positions, we demonstrated that the nonlinear model was precise and consistent in a wide range of depth, and we employed this model to realize high-quality multidirectional scene reconstruction.

Phase-3D mapping method developed from back-projection stereovision model for fringe projection profilometry.

Two major methods for 3D reconstruction in fringe projection profilometry, phase-height mapping and stereovision, have their respective problems: the former has low-flexibility in practical application due to system restrictions and the latter requires time-consuming homogenous points searching. Given these limitations, we propose a phase-3D mapping method developed from back-projection stereovision model to achieve flexible and high-efficient 3D reconstruction for fringe projection profilometry. We showed that all dimensional coordinates (X, Y, and Z), but not just the height coordinate (Z), of a measured point can be mapped from phase through corresponding rational functions directly and independently. To determine the phase-3D mapping coefficients, we designed a flexible two-step calibration strategy. The first step, ray reprojection calibration, is to determine the stereovision system parameters; the second step, sampling-mapping calibration, is to fit the mapping coefficients using the calibrated stereovision system parameters. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was suitable for flexible and high-efficient 3D reconstruction that eliminates practical restrictions and dispenses with the time-consuming homogenous point searching.

Suppression of projector distortion in phase-measuring profilometry by projecting adaptive fringe patterns.

In phase-measuring profilometry, the lens distortion of commercial projectors may introduce additional bending carrier phase and thus lead to measurement errors. To address this problem, this paper presents an adaptive fringe projection technique in which the carrier phase in the projected fringe patterns is modified according to the projector distortion. After projecting these adaptive fringe patterns, the bending carrier phase induced by the projector distortion is eliminated. Experimental results demonstrate this method to be effective and efficient in suppressing the projector distortion for phase-measuring profilometry. More importantly, this method does not need to calibrate the projector and system parameters, such as the distortion coefficients of the projector and the angle between the optical axes of projector and camera lenses. Hence, it has low computational complexity and enables us to improve the measurement precision for an arbitrary phase-measuring profilometry system.

Structured light field 3D imaging.

In this paper, we propose a method by means of light field imaging under structured illumination to deal with high dynamic range 3D imaging. Fringe patterns are projected onto a scene and modulated by the scene depth then a structured light field is detected using light field recording devices. The structured light field contains information about ray direction and phase-encoded depth, via which the scene depth can be estimated from different directions. The multidirectional depth estimation can achieve high dynamic 3D imaging effectively. We analyzed and derived the phase-depth mapping in the structured light field and then proposed a flexible ray-based calibration approach to determine the independent mapping coefficients for each ray. Experimental results demonstrated the validity of the proposed method to perform high-quality 3D imaging for highly and lowly reflective surfaces.

Flexible phase error compensation based on Hilbert transform in phase shifting profilometry.

This paper makes use of Hilbert transform to analyze and compensate the phase error caused by the nonlinear effect in phase shifting profilometry (PSP). The characteristics of the phase error distribution in Hilbert transform domain was analyzed and compared with spatial domain. A simple and flexible phase error compensation method was proposed to directly process the phase-shifting fringe images without any auxiliary conditions or complicated computation. Experimental results demonstrated that the phase error can be reduced by about 80% in three-step PSP, and more than 95% in four or more step PSP, which verified the effectiveness, flexibility, robustness and automation of the proposed phase error compensation method.