Structural Optimization for Segment-based Design of Part Candidates For Incremental Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract The Incremental Manufacturing approach is based on a production concept, where products are assembled from mass-produced parts and finalized by additive and subtractive manufacturing steps. This approach promises economic variant production but also leads to increased complexity in product design and process planning due to the enhanced degree of freedom. Therefore, new methods and tools to support product development in the early design stages are investigated to exploit the production concept’s full potential. In the context of redesigning parts for Incremental Manufacturing, a graph-based approach was introduced to support the design engineer in generating part concepts based on automated CAD model segmentation of a reference part. In this process, the extracted part segments are concretized based on algorithms, for example, by assigning predestined manufacturing processes, suitable pre-produced parts, materials, and joining technologies. For the concretization and early potential evaluation of the part candidate’s functionality in terms of mechanical performance, an optimization approach is introduced in this paper. This approach enables a combined structural optimization of part candidates with respect to the topology of additively manufactured areas and the shape of the pre-produced parts.