Data-Driven Nonlinear Deformation Design of 3D-Printable Shells

This repository contains the code for our 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2025 paper “Data-Driven Nonlinear Deformation Design of 3D-Printable Shells.”

Samuel Silverman, Kelsey L. Snapp, Keith A. Brown, Emily Whiting
Data-Driven Nonlinear Deformation Design of 3D-Printable Shells
3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing (2025)

Data

In a comprehensive prior study, we conducted uniaxial compression testing on generalized cylindrical shells (GCS) to explore their energy-absorbing capabilities.

data/ contains the processed results of 12,705 experiments:

• displacements.csv: The maximum displacement (mm) for each sample. The 100 intermediate values are obtained by linear interpolation from 0 mm to this maximum.
• forces.csv: The 100 force (N) values aligned with the displacement values from displacements.csv.
• parameters.csv: The 12 design parameters for each GCS sample.

Getting Started

Clone the repository and create the provided Conda environment for convenience and reproducibility. Then install the package locally so the command-line tools can import nonlinear_deformation_design directly.

git clone https://github.com/samsilverman/nonlinear-deformation-design.git
cd nonlinear-deformation-design
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate nonlinear-deformation-design
pip install -e .

Code

The codebase is organized into two parts:

• src/nonlinear_deformation_design/: the main Python package
• tools/: command-line entry points

Script	Description	Image
train_forward.py	Train the forward model.
train_tandem.py	Train the tandem model using a pretrained forward model from train_forward.py.
test_forward.py	Test the trained forward model.
test_tandem.py	Test the trained tandem model.
forward_design.py	Predict force-displacement curves for GCS designs.
inverse_design.py	Predict GCS designs for force-displacement curves.

Note

Each tool can be run from the repository root. For info on a specific tool run:

python tools/[TOOL].py --help

CSV formats

The forward_design.py and inverse_design.py tools accept CSV input files. Example input files can be found in examples/forward_inputs.csv and examples/inverse_inputs.csv.

Maintainers

• Sam Silverman - sssilver@bu.edu

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Adedire Adesiji for brainstorming, assistance in constructing applications, and photography; Helena Gill, Xingjian Han, and Abinit Sati for their work on constructing and running the impact absorption application; and Peter Yichen Chen for his discussions and input.

Citation

@article{Silverman:2025:DataDrivenNonlinear,
author = {Silverman, Samuel and Snapp, Kelsey L. and Brown, Keith A. and Whiting, Emily},
title = {Data-Driven Nonlinear Deformation Design of 3D-Printable Shells},
year = {2026},
journal = {3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing},
volume = {13},
number = {1},
pages = {90-100},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2024.0175},
doi = {10.1089/3dp.2024.0175},
}

License

Released under the MIT License.