Lightweight design of hydraulic integrated blocks for additive manufacturing

Aerospace hydraulic integrated blocks, which are used as the connection carriers for hydraulic lines and components on aircraft, are currently mostly of block design and have great potential for weight reduction. Topology optimisation is a structural design method to achieve the best distribution of materials under a set load, which can effectively reduce the weight of the hydraulic block, but the result is generally irregular structure, which makes it difficult to achieve its processing using traditional manufacturing methods. With the development of AM technology, the machining of topologically optimised hydraulic integrated blocks has become possible. In this paper, we will take the small hydraulic integrated block with curved flow channel and the large hydraulic integrated block with complex structure as the research object, and design the topology optimisation idea of the integrated block with the goal of reducing the weight of the integrated block, and accordingly carry out the simulation using ABAQUS. The simulation results show that the topology optimisation can reduce the weight of the hydraulic integrated block studied in this paper by more than 50%, which is a significant contribution to reducing the weight and improving the performance of the aircraft.