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Optimization of Supports in Additive Manufacturing

This work is in collaboration with Grégoire Allaire and Martin Bihr.

This is a companion webpage for the article: Support optimization in additive manufacturing for geometric and thermo-mechanical constraints.

Below you will find a recap of the results shown in the paper together with most of the data required to redo the computations. For the geometric methods a triangulation of the surface of $\partial \omega$ is given. For the results of the topology optimization algorithms the mesh, parameters, initialization and final results are shown.

Geometric methods

Below are the files used in the optimization of the orientation using geometric criteria. These are Matlab .mat files containing a structure with fields (among others):

Shape and Topology Optimization

The images below are created with the software xd3d by François Jouve.

U-shaped Tube

Finite-element mesh of a U-shaped tube and its support Optimized support allowed to touch the U-shaped tube The support may touch the shape $\omega$
Finite-element mesh for U-shaped tube support optimization without Dirichlet contact Optimized U-shaped tube support without Dirichlet contact conditions Remove all Dirichlet conditions from $\partial\omega$: the support may still touch the shape
Finite-element mesh for penalized non-contact support optimization Penalized optimized support separated from the U-shaped tube Remove all Dirichlet conditions from $\partial\omega$ and add penalization term. The support does not touch the part!

Three half U-tubes

The objective here is to obtain common supports for the same shape, repeated three times.

Finite-element mesh of three half U-tubes and their common support Optimized common support touching three half U-tubes The support may touch the shape
Finite-element mesh for three half U-tubes without Dirichlet contact Optimized common support for three half U-tubes without Dirichlet contact Remove all Dirichlet conditions from $\partial\omega$: the support may still touch the shape

Created: Sept 2019, Last modified: Sept 2019