Advanced optimisation of a mechanical product for its additive manufacturing

The main objectives of optimising a mechanical system are to reduce costs and increase performance. Thanks to additive manufacturing, it is possible to exploit shape optimisation to place the material where it is needed. This optimisation implies a gain in material and mass but also changes in mechanical behaviour, for example in the connections. Thus, the boundary conditions on the functional surfaces are different before and after the topological optimisation. The objective of this paper is to show that following a topological optimisation, the functional surfaces (i.e. the non-design spaces) have to be redesigned and/or adapted. For this purpose, it is proposed to study a mechanism using two approaches. The first is the simple optimisation of a mechanism along different optimisation paths. The second approach consists in optimising while considering the inter-linkage efforts. The proposed methodology will be applied on a case study which will demonstrate the impact on the performance with an improvement of the functional surfaces. The result of the study shows that by adapting these non-design spaces, the mechanical strength of the parts is improved with the same gain in mass.

Automated summary

The main objectives of optimising a mechanical system are to reduce costs and increase performance. Additive manufacturing enables shape optimisation to place material where it is needed. However, this optimisation results in changes in mechanical behaviour, such as connections, necessitating redesigning or adapting functional surfaces. This study proposes two approaches to optimise mechanisms and demonstrates the impact on performance improvement by adapting non-design spaces.