Methodology for design process of internal supported cylindrical thin shell made by additive manufacturing

To improve specific stiffness and strength of cylinder type shell, it is essential to make use of free space inside the cylinder to generate internal supported structure for reinforcement. In this article, an available method is introduced to design this complex structure based on the advantages of additive manufacturing, which include the subprocess of design domain generation, topology optimization, reconstruction, and analysis. Firstly, the design domain inside cylinder is created by removing swept volume from cylindrical container space. The initial structure is obtained by topology optimization and reconstructed by considering the constraints of manufacturing. Then, mechanical properties of the refined structure are checked by finite element method to give a final model. A cylindrical thin shell with slider is chosen as an example to show the detailed work process of the proposed design method, and the designed structure is generated by selective laser melting technology finally. It is proved that the proposed method is suitable for designing additive manufacturing cylinder shell with internal support. Furthermore, a traditional cylindrical thin shell is selected as a benchmark to be compared with the designed model by mechanical properties. Through the comparisons, it is concluded that internal supported cylindrical thin shell has greater bearing capacity and less weight cost than the classical cylindrical structure.