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Published on: August 4, 2018
Concurrent Topological Structure and Cross-Infill Angle Optimization for Material Extrusion Polymer Additive
Ruixiao Tang1, Chenghu Zhang1, Jikai Liu1,2
1Center for Advanced Jet Engineering Technologies (CaJET), Key Laboratory of High Efficiency and Clean Mechanical Manufacture (Ministry of Education), School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan 250061, China.
Abstract:
This paper contributes a concurrent topological structure and cross-infill angle optimization method for material extrusion type additive manufacturing (AM). This method features in modeling the process-induced material anisotropy through microscopic geometric modeling obtained by scanning electron micrographs. Numerical homogenization is performed to evaluate the equivalent effective properties of the 100-percentage cross-infilled local microstructures, and by introducing fitting functions, the relationship between equivalent effective material properties and varying cross-infill angles is empirically constructed. Then, optimization problems involving cross-infill angles as design variables are formulated, including concurrent optimization formulation. Numerical and experimental studies are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Both the numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the structural stiffness obtained by our proposed method has evidently improved.
