Abstract
AbstractAdditive manufacturing (AM) and topology optimization (TO) have a synergetic relation, as AM can produce complex TO designs, and TO provides high‐performance parts that utilize the form freedom provided by AM. Recently, TO has been tailored more toward AM with the inclusion of the minimum allowable overhang angle as a design constraint: resulting designs can be built without any support structures. This work is an extension thereof, by allowing support structures only if they are accessible, such that they can be removed after manufacturing. This is achieved by applying a conventional overhang filter twice, combined with basic operations such as geometry inversion, union, and intersection. The result is an accessibility‐aware overhang filter that can be incorporated in TO. Compared with conventional overhang filtered designs, the accessibility filter results in increased part performance and better convergence behavior. Furthermore, a modular filter structure is presented to easily construct the accessibility filter, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on several numerical cases.
Highlights
The most attractive feature of additive manufacturing (AM) is the unprecedented degree of permitted form freedom
We propose a topology optimization (TO) methodology to enforce the minimum allowable overhang angle exclusively in regions where support structures are difficult to remove
As the accessibility filter consists of a combination of other filters, we present a general framework to combine filters and calculate sensitivities, which allows for quick experimentation and adaptation
Summary
The most attractive feature of additive manufacturing (AM) is the unprecedented degree of permitted form freedom. No longer bounded by the design limitations of conventional manufacturing techniques, such as casting or milling, the challenge becomes to find the geometrical layout of the component that truly gives the best performance.[1,2] This is exactly what is provided by topology optimization (TO). A design might require a large amount of supports if the angle between a down-facing surface and the base plate is below a material/process specific value, the so called critical overhang angle αoh.[5,6,7] Support structures increase the printing cost due to increased material and postprocessing cost, they can even become impossible to remove once the printing is completed
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