Static and fatigue analysis of hybrid structures for Additive Manufacturing. The case of Roll Structure in F1 cars.

Nowadays, the research addressed to design and fabrication of lightered structures has great relevance in different fields such as mechanics, aerospace, biomedical engineering etc. Clearly, the lower weight requires additional effort in research of strong materials and design solutions to provide the best performances. For this reason, a good answer to all these needs is the use of Additive Manufacturing associate to cellular materials. The study reported in this thesis describes the application of hybrid structures to mechanical design of AM lightweight components. In particular, single repeated cell is used to build a strategic component of F1 cars after the optimization procedure. To evaluate the mechanical properties of the equivalent material, different numerical analyses were conducted with the Ansys® software. However, the total optimization procedure was completed with the Altair Hyperworks software with the minimization of the volume as objective. In the end, a fatigue analysis was run to validate the obtained results and to understand if the use of the homogeneous materials is feasible on this component. The results showed that the most stressed unit cell of the equivalent material has values below the material limits in respect of F1 normative homologation standards.