Optimizing Cutting Planes for Advanced Joining and Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

While additive manufacturing allows more complex shapes than conventional manufacturing processes, there is a clear benefit in leveraging both new and old processes in the definition of metal parts. For example, one could create complex part shapes where the main “body” is defined by extrusion and machining, while small protruding features are defined by additive manufacturing. This paper looks at how optimization and geometric reasoning can be combined to identify cutting planes within complex three-dimensional (3D) shapes. These cutting planes are used to divide realistic mechanical parts into subparts that can be joined together through additive manufacturing or linear friction welding (LFW). The optimization method presents possible manufacturing alternatives to an engineering designer where optimality is defined as a minimization of cost. The paper presents and compares several cutting planes identification methods and describes how the optimization finds the optimal results for several example parts.

Interdisciplinary Research on Designing Engineering Material Systems: Results From a National Science Foundation Workshop

“…They focus on key considerations for such evaluations, including the creation of fair and unbiased comparisons that take into account modeling abstraction, accuracy, and uncertainty representations of a given method. In the specific context of materials design, researchers have evaluated practical usefulness using research approaches that include benchmark problems and demonstration on an array of practical applications (e.g., as done in works such as [22][23][24]). The main conclusion from the workshop is that it is necessary for researchers to provide evidence about the practical usefulness of newly proposed methods, but that there is not a single approach by which everyone should do so.…”