Quantifying limits imposed by occlusions in volumetric additive manufacturing

One of the distinctive advantages of volumetric additive manufacturing is the ability to overprint freeform structures onto pre-made objects such as electronics components and reinforcing structural elements. However, these objects typically attenuate or completely block the patterning light, causing a shadowing effect that negatively impacts reconstruction accuracy. For this reason, the limit of reconstruction accuracy is highly dependent on the exact distribution of occlusions. So far, the impact of problem setting on reconstruction quality has not been well-studied in this field. In this talk, we first present two quantitative metrics that indicate the local difficulty of reconstruction and then demonstrate their utility under different occlusion arrangements and tomographic configurations. These metrics can be readily evaluated to guide design for manufacturing and system design.