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. Therefore, the software should also be able to support the function integration and provide tools to easily prepare models for the optimisation.
When dealing with Part Consolidation the starting point is an already existing Assembly. Some of the assembly parts are meant to be consolidated while some parts stay as they are and just need to be considered as void spaces in the Design Space. While other parts are not only place holders but experience boundary conditions that are passed on to the consolidated parts. About 3 (? How detailed do we want to get here?) different types of geometries can be identified and sorted in these different categories. In order to continue these different geometries need to be sorted to the different categories. This is the start of the Part Consolidation Workflow.
The Part Consolidation Workflow can be separated into the following steps:
Workflow
Some of the steps have to be repeated in order to generate the Design Space that goes into the optimisation.
From this workflow 2 tools were identified which shorten the preparation time and help create a Design Space fast and with all necessary void spaces for the placement in the overall assembly:
The Access Region Tool is responsible for creating void spaces fitting to parts that won’t be considered in the optimisation, the Excluded Parts
The Clearance Region Tool….
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