دانلود رایگان مقاله ساختار پشتیبانی بهینه سازی توپولوژی محدود برای تولید افزودنی

Abstract

There is significant interest today in integrating additive manufacturing (AM) and topology optimization (TO). However, TO often leads to designs that are not AM friendly. For example, topologically optimized designs may require significant amount of support structures before they can be additively manufactured, resulting in increased fabrication and clean-up costs. In this paper, we propose a TO methodology that will lead to designs requiring significantly reduced support structures. Towards this end, the concept of ‘support structure topological sensitivity’ is introduced. This is combined with performance sensitivity to result in a TO framework that maximizes performance, subject to support structure constraints. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical experiments, and validated through fused deposition modeling, a popular AM process.

5. Summary and future work

The main contribution of this paper is to propose a topology optimization framework that leads to designs with reduced support structures. Specifically, we introduced a novel topological sensitivity approach for constraining support structure volume during design optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme was illustrated through several numerical examples, and demonstrated using FDM technology. Support structures were assumed to be vertical for simplicity, but we believe that the methodology can be extended to handle non-vertical support structures. Additionally, the weighting proposed in this paper is simple and easy to implement. Since there are no benchmark examples in the literature for support volumes, it is difficult to evaluate efficacy of the proposed method. Finally, the work presented is seen as a first step towards a more comprehensive framework for integrating topology optimization and additive manufacturing. Additional research is needed to include other AM-related constraints, such as surface roughness, volumetric error, inter-layer fusion, and so on. Finally, the proposed method must be coupled with methods for finding the optimum build direction to further reduce support volume.