Abstract
A series of strategies for designing support structure to fabricate overhanging features in additive manufacturing (AM) is proposed. The focus of this study is to maximize the external support stiffness while requiring supports that can be easily removed, minimizing the time required to add the supports, and using the least amount of material. These design requirements become necessities not only for adding supports to improve processing and post-processing efficiency, but also for reducing the cost of supports while maintaining specimen geometry. A repulsion index (RI) is proposed for satisfying the easy removal requirement and minimizing the size of artifacts left on the specimen surface; a weighting function is applied to quantify the time consumption to build the supports. The proposed RI and cost due to additional material and time consumption in adding the support are formulated within a multi-objective topological optimization constructed by the simple isotropic material with penalization method, continuous approximation of material distribution, and method of moving asymptotes. Numerical simulations demonstrated that rational and cost effective support layouts can be determined by the proposed cost-based formulation. This allows designers to find design solutions with a compromise between the deformation and the cost of support structure.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, Republic of China under Contract No. MOST 105-2221-E-194-018 and MOST-106-2922-I-194-015.
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Kuo, YH., Cheng, CC. (2018). Optimal External Support Structure Design in Additive Manufacturing. In: Schumacher, A., Vietor, T., Fiebig, S., Bletzinger, KU., Maute, K. (eds) Advances in Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization. WCSMO 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67988-4_90
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67988-4_90
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