Printing Ready Topology Optimization for Material Extrusion Polymer Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing-oriented topology optimization features in the extreme geometric complexity that magnifies the product functional performance. However, the increased geometric complexity makes postprocessing of the designs technically nontrivial and sometimes inefficient because of too many structural details. To address this issue, this article presents a novel printing-ready topology optimization method whereby the topological designs can be directly exported in the format of a printing-ready G-code, which saves the postprocessing efforts of stereo lithograph (STL) model generation, model slicing, and tool path planning. More importantly, the slicing and tool path information can be tracked all the time during optimization to facilitate the evaluation of the tool path-related material constitutive model, for example, the fiber-reinforced composites, so as to improve the numerical analysis accuracy and the design result optimality. Finally, three case studies are performed to test the postprocessing efficiency of the printing-ready approach and the multi-scale design case, which demonstrates the outstanding high efficiency characteristic of the proposed approach.