Design and topology/shape structural optimisation for additively manufactured cold sprayed components

Abstract

Integrating advanced structural optimisation, such as topology optimisation (TO), with additive manufacturing (AM) allows design and fabrication of extremely efficient and effective components. Such integration is challenging because characteristics can vary from process to process. In this paper, designing and optimising a part for the cold spray AM process is demonstrated. Cold spray process characteristics and constraints are enforced throughout. The analysis shows a tradeoff between stress and mass, but the combined process delivers a structure at much lower stress (up to 3X reduction in peak stress in a case study) with the capability to be much lighter than the original part (case study: 20% reduction in weight). The general approach to specifying design guidelines, interpreting TO results, and applying other structural optimisation methods is directly applicable to many AM processes – and especially other spray deposition techniques – in addition to cold spray.

Keywords:

• additive manufacturing
• cold spray
• topology optimisation
• shape optimisation
• cold gas-dynamic processing
• thermal spray

Acknowledgements

The authors thank William Werkheiser at UTRC for assistance in fabricating cold sprayed structures and Carlos de Lima of Altair Engineering for helpful discussion.