| Abstract: |
| 3D printing is an umbrella term for a set of additive manufacturing technologies that fabricate highly intricate and complex designs not feasible with traditional die-casting or injection molding methods. But despite their popularization in recent years, several limitations prevent further integration into existing production lines. One recurring issue relates to overhangs, which are regions of the constructed object that when placed in a certain orientation extend outwards without any underlying support. Some of these overhangs can deform under their own weight and, if not supported from below, present a risk in damaging the printed object.
Beside printing additional support structures which increase material and processing costs, one acceptable remedy is to modify the design to be self-supporting as much as possible without compromising its intended functionality. In this talk we propose a phase field structural topology optimization framework, which realize an overhang angle constraint with the help of anisotropic perimeter functionals. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate how we discourage designs that develop overhangs not respecting the angle constraint. It turns out that for our approach we have to work with non-differentiable functionals, and thus we turn to subdifferential calculus to derive the first order optimality conditions. |
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