Part Consolidation is a very big area that has come into focus since Additive Manufacturing has become an ever growing industry with a lot of industrial applications. Through additive manufacturing the function integration can be easily realized in the manufacturing process and is well practised to reduce the number of parts, maintenance time and overall saving costs. The part consolidation is therefore a big area in the optimisation section. In an optimisation, part consolidation can be realized. To prepare a Design Space for these kinds of optimisations we identified a workflow as well as new geometry tools that support the user during the creation process.
...
The Workflow can be separated into the following steps:
...
Create an initial Design Space, based on the parts you want to consolidate
Create void spaces, based on other parts and the needed connections
Create the final Design Space with boolean operations
Create Non-Designs on the final Design Space
Create Machining Allowances on functional surfaces
Some of the steps have to be repeated in order to generate the Design Space that goes into the optimisation.
...