Abstract
Abstract
There is a promising potential in polymer composites in the automotive industry; therefore, design methods aimed at cost and weight efficiency have become increasingly important. The tool cost is a considerable amount of the total cost, which is affected by the direction of the manufacturing planes. In this paper, a method is introduced to automatically determine the optimal manufacturing direction of an arbitrary shell structure. The method is implemented in Python environment. A meshed surface model is read as input, and the geometrical complexity factors are calculated from all directions in the space in a discretized way. A new 3D branch diagram is shown with which the calculated values can be visualized and evaluated. After that, an undercut factor is introduced and calculated, and it is demonstrated that the minimum of the product of these measures can give the optimal manufacturing direction in a fully automatized way. The paper presents a study about a train seat to show the industrial applicability of the method by evaluating the effect of the manufacturing directions and geometrical complexities at different partitioning of the composite shell on material cost.