Manufacturing procedure of multi-scale structures obtained using Bi-directional Evolutionary Structural Optimization of cellular materials

Tainan Khalil Leite Calixto¹; Claudia Marcela Perez Madrid¹; Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira¹; Renato Pavanello¹

¹ UNICAMP

doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2015-0674

Resumo

With the advances in additive manufacturing techniques, development of high performance materials became a reality for engineers. In addition, Topology Optimization may be used to design new materials. In this article, a Multi-scale Topology Optimization analysis using an evolutionary technique is applied to develop a manufacturing procedure of structures with cellular materials. This procedure consists in performing a numerical validation of microstructures obtained by the Topology Optimization method, and then using additive manufacturing techniques. Cellular materials are defined as microstructures that have only one type of isotropic material and voids. For the multi-scale model, the homogenization theory is used in order to obtain the equivalent elastic properties of the micro-scale domain. It means that the material design assumes the macrostructure material to be made of infinite periodic base cells. Depending on the micro-scale topology, the macroscopic properties are defined and assumed to be homogenous for all macro-scale domain. For the optimization problem, the Bi-directional Evolutionary Structural Optimization (BESO) method is applied in this work for designing microstructures of cellular materials. The objective function is to minimize the structural mean compliance. Numerical examples are presented to validate the algorithm for different boundary conditions. Finally, this article shows the final 3D product of the manufacturing procedure and experimental results obtained for a double-clamped beam, and some details of the manufacture equipments used are also presented.

Palavras-chave: Topology Optimization; Multi-scale; Manufacture; BESO Method; Homogenization; Cellular Materials