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Move from a serial process, consisting of islands of sub-optimization and manual design manipulation, to a seamless integrated rule-based environment capable of achieving advanced design features.
Multidisciplinary Design Analysis for Seamless Additive Manufacturing Design, Analysis, Build, and Redesign Workflows
Designing for additive manufacturing allows for improvements, such as lightweighting structures by more than 50% and enhancing thermal performance by more than 20%, but it is currently a long and manual process of optimization. The software currently forces serial processing of the design through islands of sub-optimization and manual design manipulation, failure at any of these serial steps usually results in starting the entire process over.
The objective of this project was to address the development of a methodology to create Design For Manufacturability (DFM) criteria and rules for advanced design features. Additionally, the project also sought to improve software techniques for design performance optimization, which subsequently made step-change improvements in the cycle time required to perform additive manufacturing (AM) CAD/CAM/CAE analyses and design optimization, and allowed for the exploitation of AM on multiphysics design enhancement. Initial Machine Material datasets were also created along with process workflows and characterization methodologies.
The project research of this collaboration team made up of DoD and commercial primes, including four of the major software suppliers, in conjunction with two research institutions will benefit the entire AM industry. The team developed an approach in three phases:
The team successfully mapped out Raytheon and GE’s design process flows, which are required to execute design and analysis for both lightweight and down-selected enhanced features for multi-disciplinary engineered structure designs (e.g., repeated sub-sections, systematic geometric transitions, and boundary conformal geometry) that are important for numerous applications.
Raytheon and GE started by installing all of the CAD/CAM/CAE software and received training from the suppliers. The team also:
The CAD/CAE software tools were made available for evaluation and training to both the America Makes Innovation Factory, as well as the satellite location at the W.M. Keck Center at the University of Texas El Paso.