Pitch Control Unit redesign for additive manufacturing

The objective of this thesis is to optimize an existing design exploiting the potential of additive manufacturing to a case study. The evolution of the additive manufacturing (AM) technology has opened the opportunity to combine topology optimization and additive manufacturing to develop new designs to be lighter, cheaper and more efficient. This thesis work is inserted in a design review where the opportunity to assist to the development of every phase of the design process, which goes from the identification of suitable candidates for AM, is associated to the exploration of different concepts, the design of the definitive concept, and finally the definition of the topology optimization and the smoothing. The thesis first presents a classification of the various technologies for AM, focusing more in the powder bed fusion of metals. These technologies are likely to replace the current manufacturing process and a balance with advantages and disadvantages is made. Subsequently, different types of structural optimization are presented as they are likely to be combined with AM. From all the available options presented, topology optimization is applied to the case study. The main driver for optimization has been to reduce mass with maintained or even improved mechanical properties as a constraint. This has been combined as well with design guidelines for AM to respect the manufacturing limiting parameters. Structural optimization has demonstrated to be an outstanding tool in the design process. Nevertheless it is still the designer’s task to assess and interpret the results from optimization to identify the most effective application of all of these techniques, while obviously as in every structural analysis, to apply loads and boundary conditions properly making the correct considerations.