Minimum Compliance Topology Optimization of Shell-Infill Composites for Additive Manufacturing

Additively manufactured parts are often composed of two sub-structures, a solid shell forming their exterior and a porous infill occupying the interior. To account for this feature this paper presents a novel method for generating simultaneously optimized shell and infill in the context of minimum compliance topology optimization.

Our method builds upon two recently developed approaches that extend density-based topology optimization: A coating approach to obtain an optimized shell that is filled uniformly with a prescribed porous base material, and an infill approach which generates optimized, non-uniform infill within a prescribed shell.

To evolve the shell and infill concurrently, our formulation assigns two sets of design variables: One set defines the base and the coating, while the other set defines the infill structures. The resulting intermediate density distributions are unified by a material interpolation model into a physical density field, upon which the compliance is minimized.

Enhanced by an adapted robust formulation for controlling the minimum length scale of the base, our method generates optimized shell-infill composites suitable for additive manufacturing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on numerical examples, and analyze the influence of different design specifications.