Structural optimization under overhang constraints imposed by additive manufacturing processes: an overview of some recent results

The purpose of this note is to report on the recent work [2, 3], where new structural optimization strategies are proposed so that the optimized designs are free of overhang regions, which jeopardize their constructibility by additive manufacturing technologies. After showing numerical evidence that the intuitive angle-based criteria alone are insufficient to overcome this difficulty, a new constraint functional of the domain is introduced, which aggregates the self-weights of all the intermediate structures appearing in the course of the layer by layer assembly of the total structure. The mathematical analysis of this constraint is outlined and an algorithm is proposed to accelerate the significant computational effort entailed by the implementation of these ideas. Eventually, a numerical validation and several concrete examples are discussed.