Investigation on part consolidation for additive manufacturing with SIMP method

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) process comprises of different technologies which fabricate physical components from 3D CAD models by adding material layer-upon-layer. The unique capabilities of AM technologies are shape complexity, material complexity and hierarchical complexity. These enable new opportunities for customization of the product; fabricate intricate and complex shapes easier than the traditional method. Therefore, AM allows to consolidate the number of parts of an assembly to a single component and fabricate it. Though reducing part count in the assembly can avoid some assembly operations, the fullest potential of AM could not be achieved without material reduction. So the optimization step employed to lightweight the design. This paper demonstrates the above with an assembly of bactibiogramscope gantry head. Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) used to minimise material consumption. The optimised assembly was fabricated by the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) process. The final design was evaluated by comparing FEA result with experimental results. It also shows that topology optimized consolidate assembly take less time and material fabricate. This paper highlights the integration of part consolidation and topology optimizations to capitalize on the AM technique for fabricating better products.