Design for stressed and additively manufactured lightweight structures

Additive Manufacturing (AM) represents a new class of disruptive production and prototyping technologies. Topology optimization has been known to produce a high level of complexity in generated structure designs that is suitable for AM. Design for stress is a major factor in a number of scientific applications, where AM still experiences its own limitations that are unique to it. When such limitations and stress factors are not considered, postprocessing is generally required to modify generated designs such that it adds to cost and reduces performance of optimized structures. Hence, a stress-based optimization framework is proposed in conjunction to an AM model that incorporates the main trait of AM processes. With a density-based framework, the approach can be used with stress clustering to optimize the number of stress factors with a conventional topology optimization solver. The approach ensures the design of structures with restricted AM geometries that does not violate the filtering size constraints by use of stress clusters for compliance-based minimization problems.