Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of minimizing support material in additive manufacturing (AM) during topology optimization (TO) in order to reduce material and post-processing costs. The TO method developed in this paper utilizes the moving morphable components (MMC) approach, where a structure is composed of several building blocks. This work introduces minimum build angle constraints to eliminate overhanging edges, supplementing these with penalty functions to ensure connectivity between building blocks, such that the TO output is printable. The MMC approach uses explicit geometric entities for the morphable components that are controlled by geometric parameters, such as length, thickness, and angle. These parameters are the design variables. Using this approach enables the formulation of geometric manufacturing constraints and the construction of CAD models, which are important advantages of the MMC method. Examples of a short cantilever beam and an MBB beam demonstrate the capabilities of the TO methods.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to show our gratitude to Dr. Krister Svanberg from KTH Royal Institute of Technology who provided the Matlab code GCMMA as the optimization algorithm of this work. We also thank Dr. Xu Guo from Dalian University of Technology for providing an example Matlab code of their MMC framework, although they may not agree with all of the interpretations/conclusions of this paper.
We thank Drs. Oliver Weeger and Narasimha Boddeti, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), for sharing their expertise and insightful feedback, and for assistance during the course of this research.
Finally, we acknowledge the International Design Centre, funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education, at SUTD for their partial support of this work.
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Xian, Y., Rosen, D.W. Morphable components topology optimization for additive manufacturing. Struct Multidisc Optim 62, 19–39 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-019-02466-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-019-02466-6