Lightweight design of mountaineering protection gear: Procedure, Optimization, and Testing

Mountaineering is usually labelled as an extreme sport with a risk of injury. Protection gear offers climbers safety, but usually at the cost of additional weight. Producing a lightweight design with a large enough load-bearing capacity is desired by the industry. This paper aims to prepare a lightweight design of a spring-loaded camming device utilizing effective topology optimization. The proposed procedure contains optimization, manufacturing and testing of a new design. Topology optimization is used on cams to find optimal material distribution concerning their stiffness. Topology optimization uses multiple load cases and multi-stage optimization. The combination leads to effective design without compromising the efficiency of optimization. The presented results yield a time reduction of up to 70 %. After post-processing of results and smoothing geometry, the new cams are additively manufactured and assembled into prototypes of spring-loaded camming devices, and they are evaluated by laboratory testing defined by standards.