The effects of bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization parameters on an industrial designed component for additive manufacture

An assessment of the effect of topology optimization design parameters on the performance of an additively manufactured part has been performed. The dependence of the output from a topology optimization involving an aerospace component on the topology optimization control parameters, evolution rate and filter radius was determined. The converged strain energy was found to depend quadratically on the filter radius while the number of iterations required to achieve a solution was broadly related to the evolution rate. These findings demonstrate the potential for significant design efficiencies when manufacturing using additive manufacturing approaches but also the need to be aware of the sensitivity of the bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization optimized design on the selected optimization parameters. This sensitivity can potentially be used advantageously to steer the solution to an optima with features suitable to a particular manufacturing method such as additive manufacturing.