NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

In today’s competitive markets, companies are constantly looking for new ways to reduce cost and bring their products faster to market. Emerging new additive manufacturing (AM) techniques opens up new opportunities in creating lightweight parts and accelerate parts production. New AM machines are becoming more and more capable to print complex organic shaped structures and lattice structures. Lattice structure is a type of structure made of two or three-dimensional beams or struts, that can dramatically reduce weight, retain structural integrity and provide other advantages such as high surface area, desirable noise damping and shock absorption properties. To take full advantages of AM processes, designers are starting to include lattices structures in design of new parts.

In this paper, we discuss an approach that combines multi-disciplinary design study techniques with structural optimization methods to design a part with lattices which can be manufactured using additive manufacturing. To illustrate our proposed approach, we use an example in which the goal is to find the best lattice cell type that will provide maximum structural stiffness for a given mass for specified load cases. In our example, the part is subjected to 3 different load cases i.e. torsion, bending and shear. The FE analysis of the part with lattices is carried out by using a homogenized material that represents the lattice type. To maximize part stiffness, each lattice cell bar diameter is optimized using sizing optimization technique. The multi-disciplinary design study technique is used to find the best lattice cell type that will provide the highest stiffness for the specified loadcases. Three key advantages of using the proposed combined approach are a) The sizing optimization method efficiently finds the stiffest structure for the given mass fraction and lattice cell type. b) The multi-disciplinary design study technique finds the best lattice cell type with maximum stiffness. c) The multi-disciplinary design study technique also provides valuable insights into the design space. In the example problem, the structural analysis and optimization software, GENESIS, and the multi-disciplinary design study and optimization software, VisualDOC are used to demonstrate the proposed combined optimization approach.