Thermal topology optimization design method of spindle under temperature-structure field coupling condition based on irregular cell

A hybrid cellular automaton method (HCAM) applied with irregular cell was proposed to realize the thermal topological optimization design for the coupled field of spindle structure in order to adapt to the complex geometrical shape and avoid the problem which the traditional regular rectangular cells could not uniformly cover the design area. The traditional rectangular cell of HCAM was replaced by irregular cell based on the theory of numerical heat transfer. The idea of local mesh refinement was introduced to realize local cell refinement in the area where the stress could be concentrated or strain sharp changed, and the cell size of the whole structure could adaptively change. The comparison analysis results show that the method is feasible. The method can effectively adapt to the complex structure shape, reduce the number of cellular elements and finite element grids, and reduce the difficulty of mapping between cellular elements and finite element grids. The thermal topology optimization design of the temperature-structure field coupling spindle structure under different working conditions was analyzed by using the irregular cell HCAM. Results showed that the final thermal topology optimization results not only reduced the material of spindle, but also improved its thermal characteristics. © 2020, Zhejiang University Press. All right reserved.