Additive Manufacturing-Oriented Design of Graded Lattice Structures Through Explicit Topology Optimization

Abstract

In the present work, a new approach for designing graded lattice structures is developed under the moving morphable components/voids (MMC/MMV) topology optimization framework. The essential idea is to make a coordinate perturbation to the topology description functions (TDF) that are employed for the description of component/void geometries in the design domain. Then, the optimal graded structure design can be obtained by optimizing the coefficients in the perturbed basis functions. Our numerical examples show that the proposed approach enables a concurrent optimization of both the primitive cell and the graded material distribution in a straightforward and computationally effective way. Moreover, the proposed approach also shows its potential in finding the optimal configuration of complex graded lattice structures with a very small number of design variables employed under various loading conditions and coordinate systems.