A fairly recent development in additive manufacturing is printing with conductive materials. This allows for sensors to be embedded into products during manufacturing.
In the development of this field it was found that the printing process causes the electrical properties of the product to be anisotropic. The material is extruded in meanders, which produce track elements, or “traxels”, in the final product. Depending on the printer settings the quality of the bonds between the traxels can vary, leading to varying contact resistances between them. This affects the electrical properties of the bulk product as well. These properties could be both advantageous and disadvantageous, but in both cases it would be useful to model the behavior.
Such a model was created by Daniel Wilmes.