A System for High-Resolution Topology Optimization

Abstract

A key requirement in 3D fabrication is to generate objects with individual exterior shapes and their interior being optimized to application-specific force constraints and low material consumption. Accomplishing this task is challenging on desktop computers, due to the extreme model resolutions that are required to accurately predict the physical shape properties, requiring memory and computational capacities going beyond what is currently available. Moreover, fabrication-specific constraints need to be considered to enable printability. To address these challenges, we present a scalable system for generating 3D objects using topology optimization, which allows to efficiently evolve the topology of high-resolution solids towards printable and light-weight-high-resistance structures. To achieve this, the system is equipped with a high-performance GPU solver which can efficiently handle models comprising several millions of elements. A minimum thickness constraint is built into the optimization process to automatically enforce printability of the resulting shapes. We further shed light on the question how to incorporate geometric shape constraints, such as symmetry and pattern repetition, in the optimization process. We analyze the performance of the system and demonstrate its potential by a variety of different shapes such as interior structures within closed surfaces, exposed support structures, and surface models.

Infill Optimization for Additive Manufacturing—Approaching Bone-Like Porous Structures

“…Different from exact length scale control, we propose a projection method in an approximate manner which facilitates fast numerical solution. In our work we employ the potential of numerical multigrid schemes to enable topology optimization at high resolution and effi-ciency [28]. Approaching bone-like structures While we approach bone-like porous structures for their superior mechanical properties by using topology optimization, we note that other directions-considering different aspects of boneexist for generating such structures.…”

Support Structures for Additive Manufacturing: A Review

“…The general workflow of TO for 3D printing can be found in the following review [86]. Many researchers have done relevant works [87][88][89][90][91][92]. Unfortunately, to the best of the authors' knowledge, only seven papers are related to the reduction of the support structure.…”

Support-free hollowing for 3D printing via Voronoi diagram of ellipses

“…Both static balance and dynamic balance have been studied by designing the interior infills as well as changing the model shapes [15,16,17]. Instead of designing hollowing structure explicitly, a lot of efforts have been put on topology optimization to obtain distributions of material according to certain performance criteria during the last three decades [18,19]. However, these works have not handled the problem of avoiding large overhangs.…”