Improving mechanical topology optimization (TO) results by substitution of biomimetic beams is one possibility to achieve designs of mechanical components that are highly sustainable and show good mechanical performance. Due to their geometric complexity such designs were found to be well suited for production by laser additive manufacturing.
One obstacle of incorporating biomimetics beams in TO designs is the lack of detailed design methodologies. 1 proposed a corresponding design concept. Building on their concept this work presents a detailed methodology for abstraction of TO results to a design consisting of ball nodes and cylindrical beams. Using such an auxiliary design, the internal forces and moments of the beams can be evaluated to allow for the substitution of suitable biomimetic beams to generate biomimetic component designs in a next step.
The work presents a skeletonization algorithm based on the potential field approach. Using the skeletonization and an additional analysis of the dimensions of the beams in the TO result, the algorithm develops an auxiliary design of the original TO result.
The final algorithm was applied to three common TO results to obtain one auxiliary component design, each. The developed algorithm was found to generate abstractions that were well-suited for use in the methodology proposed in 1 as internal forces and moments in the abstracted beams could be evaluated with low effort.
Therefore, the work contributes to a detailed design methodology for biomimetic mechanical components in the field of design for additive manufacturing (DfAM)