Accessibility of support structures in topology optimization for additive manufacturing. (18th January 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: van de Ven, Emiel; Ayas, Can; Langelaar, Matthijs; Maas, Robert; van Keulen, Fred
• Is Part Of: International journal for numerical methods in engineering. Volume 122:Number 8(2021)
• Page Start: 2038
• Page End: 2056
• Publication Date: 2021-01-18
• Subjects: accessibility of supports -- additive manufacturing -- overhang -- topology design; Numerical analysis -- Periodicals; Engineering mathematics -- Periodicals; 620.001518
• DOI: 10.1002/nme.6611
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0029-5981

Abstract

Abstract: Additive 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.