The significant presence of defects in additively manufactured (AM) components strongly affects the mechanical performance and must be properly accounted in topology optimization (TO) design in order to obtain feasible results. In this paper, a generalized formulation of defect\u2010driven TO for fatigue design, named TopFat, is proposed. In particular, the first principal stress, that causes the crack propagation, is limited in accordance with the defect size distribution of the AM process. As the largest defect depends on the final volume of the component, which changes according to the topology, an iterative procedure is here proposed where the optimization problem is formulated without imposing volume constraints. The procedure is
\nimplemented in Hypermesh commercial software and applied to an actual aerospace bracket component.
\nStrength and limitations of the proposed methodology are discussed in comparison with the TO formulations presented in the literature. Results show that considering the defect population significantly affects the final topology, while leading to a feasible optimum. Also, even though the computational time increases, an additional 15% of mass saving is achieved by adopting the proposed iterative procedure with respect to a volume constraint\u2010based formulation of TopFat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"class_list":["post-974","pubblicazione","type-pubblicazione","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n