Análise da influência do refinamento da malha de elementos finitos em corpos de prova cilíndricos gerados por otimização topológica na resistência por compressão

Abstract

Artificial intelligence assisted design has proven to be a very valuable tool in the design of simplified components. Allied to other technologies such as additive manufacturing, it facilitates the development of complex projects and enables the manufacture of new components using non-traditional methods and geometries. The goal of this work was to compare the compression strenght of cylindrical parts 3D printed in ABS and obtained through topology optimization , varying mesh refinment, with non-optimized parts with different infill patterns and similar mass reduction. To accomplish this, two sets of cylindrical samples were generated: one with internal structures formed by already known and studied fillings and another with internal structures obtained by topological optimization, in which each sample was generated by changing the density of the finite element mesh using software SolidWorks. The samples were subjected to compression tests in order to verify the applicability of OT to generate low-density internal structures and, to compare them to the fillers most used in 3D printing generated in slicing. Therefore, the influence of the finite element mesh density on the generation of OT samples was was studied. Among the three mesh densities tested, the specimens generated with the lowest density showed the highest compressive strength, reaching values of maximum supported force similar to those obtained in the samples with hexagonal filling. The lowest strengh values were obtained in samples in which the external walls had three or less layers of material, indicating an influence of the number of external layers on the compressive strength as well.