Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM) has undergone rapid development over the past decade, yet printing parts with overhangs still poses a critical challenge, restricting the fabrication of components with arbitrary geometries. In structural optimization, incorporating overhang constraints can mitigate this issue. However, prior research has predominantly focused on 3-axis machines, leaving multi-axis capabilities insufficiently explored. These conventional 3-axis approaches often necessitate considerable trade-offs in structural material consumption. To overcome this, our study introduces a novel two-step optimization method tailored for multi-axis AM, which uses an optimized structure from traditional layout optimization as the starting point. The first step involves decomposing the design domain into multiple zones and solving a novel optimization problem to identify optimal local build directions for each zone, aiming to maximize the structure's printability. If the printability is still not satisfactory, we proceed to a second step, which refines the structure and build directions to minimize overhanging elements. Our examples validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing that the substantial performance sacrifices typically associated with 3-axis approaches are reduced to less than 7 % with our multi-axis AM-based approach.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 119680 |
Journal | Engineering Structures |
Volume | 327 |
Early online date | 13 Jan 2025 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 13 Jan 2025 |
Data Availability Statement
Data will be made available on request.Funding
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No.52208215) for its financial support for the work of this project. Additionally, appreciation is extended to the INTEGRADDE project, part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant No. 820776), which provided the foundational research critical to this study.
Keywords
- Multi-axis additive manufacturing
- Printing path planning
- Self-support structures
- Structure optimization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Civil and Structural Engineering