Abstract

The use of additive manufacturing (AM) has increased considerably in recent years. This technology has been used in many areas due to the possibility of creating complex shapes in an easy, fast, and without wasting material. This creative freedom also allows components to be highly optimized according to their function. Currently, there are advanced algorithms that allow final users to perform topology optimization in the computer-aided design (CAD) phase. However, the optimization results might not be respected or considered during the downstream AM planning processes like slicing hence the optimized structural design may be lost during the actual fabrication process. This work has a focus on topology optimization during the toolpath planning process, instead of only in the CAD phase, by taking into account the toolpath characteristics presented in the AM processes.
For an AM process whose toolpath is a set of lines such as fused deposition modeling (FDM), this thesis develops a line based topology optimization using the principal stress line (PSL) as the guidance in generating optimized toolpaths. The method is efficient, controllable, and able to consider the characteristics of the AM process. The computation results can be directly converted into toolpaths, so that the fabrication will follow faithfully as what is planned. Experimental structural tests were performed on the proposed method and the results obtained demonstrate that the strategy of applying PSL-based optimization in toolpath planning is a promising direction to complement the topologically optimized results from the CAD phase.