Friday, March 24th, 2023. Time: 12 noon

Hybrid! O.C. Zienkiewicz Room, C1 Building, UPC Campus Nord, Barcelona |
Link for online session

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ABSTRACT

One of the current challenges of the aerospace industry is the exploration of new lightweighting structures to reduce fuel consumption and limit the environmental impact. The use of topology optimization techniques allows such weight reduction, minimizing design time and cost. However, complex designs are obtained, which are only possible to manufacture with additive manufacturing. Consequently, the numerical optimization must be combined with 3D printing constraints to ensure manufacturability (minimal length scale and overhang constraints) and avoid the apparition of complex shapes and volumes with unintuitive holes.

The concept of anisotropic perimeter has been introduced to penalize the overhang constraint in the 3D printing direction. Different case studies are defined in order to assess their feasibility. Results obtained show that local bars with small length scales are removed and vertical tendency orientation of bars are generally obtained.

SPEAKER CV

Jose Antonio Torres is a PhD Student at the Composites and Advanced Materials for Multifunctional Structures investigation center. He has been awarded with the FI AGAUR predoctoral fellowship.

He graduated from the Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Technology Engineering (UPC-ESEIAAT) in 2020, and later from the Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering (UPC-ESEIAAT) in 2022. His master thesis project has been supervised by Alex Ferrer, with excellent promising results. Inside the context of additive manufacturing, new numerical tools have been developed for structural design through topology optimization, more specifically when considering minimal length and overhang constraints. Obtaining a cum-laude mention in the project, his master thesis has been selected by the UPC as the best project to be presented as candidate in the 19th Pegasus Student Conference.

He is now investigating inside the field of topology optimization applied to materials architected in space and time, coupling structural optimization with non-linear hyperelasticity, and using some advanced numerical techniques like phase-field models, high-performance computing, iterative solvers and large-scale optimization. His doctoral thesis is supervised by Alex Ferrer and Fermin Otero.