Making the Connection Between Optimisation and Additive Manufacturing

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The advancement of additive manufacturing methods over the last 5 years is something that has been both valuable to industry and an exciting field of development. Supporting this development has been both the drive by software developers to investigate and develop new ways to determine optimum designs taking into account of these new manufacturing methods.

Additive Manufacturing lends itself to complex internal architectures that could not previously be manufactured using traditional methods, with one such approach being internal lattice structures. Several companies have therefore focussed on the optimisation of such structures, including companies like Within Labs

What is an interesting point for discussion is that suitable methods for developing optimal internal lattice structures have been available in commercial codes for over a decade in products such as VR&D Genesis, Altair OptiStruct and MSC Nastran. Supporting optimisation methods such as Topology (material distribution), sizing (section sizes) and Shape (geometry changes) the technologies can be argues to more than readily exist to optimise structures such as internal lattices.

Whilst methods will continue to be refined and improved, the discussion should perhaps therefore be how to better make the connection between engineers designing additively manufactured parts and these well suited optimisation tools.

 

Topology and Shape Optimisation of Internal Lattice Structure

By way of example, I have simply applied the process of Topology and free-shape optimisation available in the long established tool, VR&D Genesis, to optimising the internal lattice of a turbine blade. The optimisation very efficiently determines which lattices should be used through Topology. Additionally , the inclusion of free-shape optimisation to the lattice intersection points allows Genesis to freely optimally support the structural loading.

GRM would welcome debate on this topic on how the engineering community can better take advantage of such well-established optimisation tools to the ever growing and exciting field of additive manufacturing.