Design Space Creation Workflow for Part Consolidation

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.

When dealing with Part Consolidation the starting point is an already existing Assembly. Some selected parts of the assembly are meant to be consolidated while other parts need to stay as they are. For these parts void spaces as well as access regions need to be considered while creating a Design Space. While again a third group of components are not only place holders but experience boundary conditions that are passed on to the consolidated parts. So these are about 3 different types of geometries that can be identified and sorted in these different categories. This is the start of the Design Space Creation Workflow for Part Consolidation.

The Workflow can be separated into the following steps:

Some of the steps have to be repeated in order to generate the Design Space that goes into the optimisation.

To support the creation of the Design Space the Design Space Tool Bounding Box method is introduced as well as the two Geometry Tools Access & Clearance Region Tool. The Bounding Box method creates the initial Design Space from the original parts that are to be consolidated. The two other tools create the necessary void spaces that are subtracted from this initial Design Space to fit the geometric boundary conditions.

The Access Region Tool is responsible for creating placeholders for void spaces which are necessary for installation and maintenance reasons. Further Information here.
The Clearance Region Tool is responsible for creating void spaces around parts which are part of the assembly but are not part of the optimisation model. Further information here.

The Machining Allowance Tool is of course also used in these optimisation models to produce ready to manufacture results. Further information regarding the Machining Allowance Tool here.