TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION IN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

Abstract

Right from its inception, additive manufacturing has consistently revolutionized the ways in which components are manufactured in various industries by making it possible to engineer more complex and custom-made products, which are otherwise difficult to achieve using traditional manufacturing approaches. Topology optimization when integrated into additive manufacturing provides unmatched possibilities for the manufacturing of lightweight, more intricate and customized products using less material at a relatively lower production cost and time, and in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable way. Despite these possibilities, there is still some lack of adequate scholarly articles in the subject of topology optimization in additive manufacturing for industrial applications. This thesis aims at applying appropriate topology optimization methods for enhancing the design of functional components for aerospace and biomedical applications. These components will be produced via additive manufacturing, and we aspire to modify them in a way that leads to weight reduction without sacrificing their original mechanical properties. Density-based techniques and the level set method implemented in ANSYS WORKBENCH1 were used to optimize the models whereas the Ultimaker S52 3D printer was used for 3D printing. Finally, the LGTester3 compression and tensile machine was used to test and compare the mechanical strength of the printed parts. Overall, a 20% weight reduction was achieved with the optimized designs while maintaining the compression displacement of the initial components. This result indicates that topologically optimized components can significantly enhance the design of components, especially for the case of weight-sensitive industrial application.