Lattice Pickle Ball Racket

I designed a fully 3D printed Pickle Ball Racket with a team of 4 students. The racket is designed to be printed on a Stratasys J850, a material jetting printer that works by depositing drops of UV curable resin layer by layer. The printer is capable of mixing resins, enabling full color prints and the mixing of different materials.

 

The racket is composed of multiple lattices that aid in reducing vibration and sound. The lattice at center of the racket is denser and made of an elastomeric material. While the perimeter lattice is less dense and uses are more rigid material. A particular challenge was designing channels for support removal. The support material must be washed away hence the channels and openings on the racket sides.

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We added the Georgia Tech's mascot Buzz and the GT logo to our racket face in full color.

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I was specifically in charge of designing and optimizing the internal lattice structure for 1 of the 2 rackets in nTop. The racket lattice designed features two different racket lattice types to support printability, support removal, and uniform hitting surface.

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A particular challenge was meshing the racket and exporting to the print slicer. The internal lattice geometry was difficult to mesh due to the small intricate features. I learned about different types of meshes, methods to reduce the mesh file size without harming print resolution, and file types for 3D printing (3MF, OBJ).

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Finally, I setup and ran a FEA study in nTop. I looked at displacement and stress over the length of the racket. I applied a point load at the center of the "sweet spot" and fixed the bottom face of the grip. Setting up the "connector" block in nTop was particularly difficult due to the many different bodies. Conducting the FEA in a traditional CAD package would've been much more difficult if not impossible due to the complicated lattices.