INTEGRATING THE ABILITY FOR TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION IN A COMMERCIAL CAD-SYSTEM
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco CantaMESsa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Serena Graziosi
Author: Schmelcher, Johannes; Stetter, Ralf; Till, Markus
Series: ICED
Institution: University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, Germany
Section: Design Methods and Tools - part 2
Page(s): 173-182
ISBN: 978-1-904670-69-8
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
An promising approach in optimizing parts with respect to their weight and simultaneously preserve their functionality, is designing parts in a way, where material is only present in regions, which are important for the functionality, and all other regions which do not contribute to the stiffness remain void. This is called topology optimization and leads to a design which is optimal concerning the distribution of forces. Since these benefits of topology optimization are readily known, research activities are very high in the past decades. Numerous methods have been developed and existing methods have been further advanced. Research activities can be divided into density-based methods, hard-kill methods, boundary variation methods and biologically inspired methods. One aspect which is not the focus of papers currently published is the integration of the actual optimization method into the product development process. Therefore this work focuses on the integration of topology optimization into product development processes by developing an easy deployable topology optimization tool which is completely integrated in the CAD system Creo Parametric 2.0.
Keywords: Computational Design Synthesis, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Design For X (DfX), Optimisation