Structural analysis of a gearbox housing: compatibility of alternative FE software and free size optimization

Due to the possibility of producing shapes that met high standard characteristics and were unfeasible by traditional manufacturing techniques, additive manufacturing has quickly attracted the aviation industry interest. This led to the creation and redesign of a large number of components. The growth in computer softwares capabilities and computational power helped this process and provided new tools such as computer-aided structural optimization. This work aimed to adopt a free size optimization analysis for optimizing the shape of an aeronautical gearbox housing manufactured using additive technologies. A fundamental step has been implementing and validating the model into a new finite element software environment compared to the already developed counterpart. The software adopted for this work was Hyperworks provided by Altair. In the beginning, additive manufacturing and how finite elements analysis software are used in product and industrial design is presented. After that, the case study is described in detail, and later the actual setup of the model and the component optimization process is discussed. Implementing such optimization required considerable efforts from the modelling point of view. The results show a good agreement with the initial well-established model. The free size optimization revealed space for optimizing the component geometry and obtaining better performance. The preliminary findings discussed in this work open for further deeper analyses into the application of such tool at the design stage. that must be deepened in the future to obtain a geometry suitable for the printing process.