Elsevier

Materials & Design

Volume 183, 5 December 2019, 108164
Materials & Design

Review on design and structural optimisation in additive manufacturing: Towards next-generation lightweight structures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2019.108164Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Extensive review, providing a joint perspective on design and structural optimisation in additive manufacturing (AM).

  • Overview on the lightweighting approaches topology optimization and latticing, considering isotropic material assumptions.

  • Consolidated summary, elucidating the gaps between design and manufacturing as well as academia and industry.

  • Establishment of a design for AM framework, highlighting the interdependencies between state-of-the art research topics.

  • Identification of future trajectories beneficial to explore in pursuit of exploiting the potential AM has on offer.

Abstract

As the application of additive manufacturing (AM) reaches an unprecedented scale in both academia and industry, a reflection upon the state-of-the-art developments in the design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) and structural optimisation, becomes vital for successfully shaping the future AM-landscape. A framework, highlighting both the interdependencies between these two central aspects in AM and the necessity for a holistic approach to structural optimization, using lightweight strategies such as topology optimization and/or latticing, was established to summarize the reviewed content. Primarily focusing on isotropic material considerations and basic stiffness-optimal problems, these concepts have already found wide application, bridging the gaps between design and manufacturing as well as academia and industry. In pursuit of streamlining the AM-workflow towards digitally print-ready designs, studies are increasingly investigating mathematically-based structural optimization approaches in conjunction with DfAM-specific constraints, providing a portfolio of solutions like generative design, which is gaining traction in industry. Besides an overview on economically-driven to performance-driven design optimizations, insight into commercial AM-specific software is provided, elucidating potentials and challenges for the community. Despite the abundance of AM design methods to-date, computationally inexpensive solutions for common engineering problems are still scarce, which is constituting one of many key challenges for the future.

Keywords

Design for additive manufacturing (DfAM)
Topology optimisation
Lattices
Additive manufacturing
Lightweight structures

Data availability

The data that supports the findings of this study are also openly available to download from https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.panesar and MendeleyData.

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