Active Surface Clustering for Component Generation from System Models

Additive manufacturing (AM) is steadily evolving from a prototyping into a manufacturing technology, enabling new approaches to product design. However, this increased design freedom also increases the number of feasible component partitioning and component consolidation variants for a product. These variants are hereafter referred to as design variants. Existing approaches for partitioning and consolidating components are applicable to products with existing component data. These approaches rely on analyzing properties, functional or active surfaces, and CAD geometries of existing components to identify improved design variants. However, in early or greenfield product development, such data of existing components is limited. These approaches as well as other design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) approaches use active surfaces to (a) describe functionally required geometries of the product and (b) provide an initial basis for embodiment design. Consequently, when no complete CAD geometries are available, active surfaces can serve as a suitable basis for generating design variants. A key challenge is to identify meaningful groups of active surfaces that form candidates for components. Such groups must satisfy product requirements and realize the intended functions. As the creation and validation of the active surface groups of one design variant are time-consuming, a manual exploration of all design variants is not feasible. Therefore, this contribution proposes a proof of concept for an algorithm for the automatic identification of valid groups of active surfaces. It uses machine-readable product data from a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) system model with active surfaces. Applying the algorithm to the case of an electro-hydraulic actuator (EHA) shows that multiple variants of valid active surface groups can be identified with a timeframe of around 1 min per design variant. This provides a basis for systematic exploration of design variants in design for additive manufacturing.