Influence of Manufacturing Constraints on the Topology Optimization of an Automotive Dashboard

Topology Optimization (TO) methods optimize material layout to design light-weight and high-performance products. However, TO methods, applied for components or assembly with high complexity shape or for structures with copious number of parts respectively, do not usually take into account the manufacturability of the optimized geometries, then a heavy further work is required to engineer the product, risking to compromise the mass reduction achieved. Within an Industry 4.0 approach, we propose to evaluate manufacturing constraints since early stages of the conceptual design to perform a TO coherent with the manufacturing technology chosen. Several approaches of TO with different manufacturing constraints such as casting and extrusion are proposed and each solution is compared. The optimum conceptual design is determined in order to minimize the component weight while satisfying both the structural targets and the manufacturing constraints; a case study on a high-performance sport car dashboard is finally presented.