TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF THERMOELASTIC STRUCTURES FOR AN ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING PROCESS

摘要

A system and a method provide topology optimization of thermoelastic structures for an additive manufacturing process. A density-based topology optimization formulation is received for designing a multi-material thermoelastic structure including a main composite structure and one or more support structures. This formulation is in the form of a multi-objective topology optimization problem that optimizes two competing objective functions, a first objective function related to mechanical performance and a second objective function related to thermal performance. This problem is solved based on a design variable update scheme which has the ability to solve non-self-adjoint topology optimization problems with an arbitrary number of volume constraints, each of which can be imposed to a subset of candidate materials, to sub-regions of a design domain, or to a combination of the two.