Topology optimisation is an increasingly important process used in a variety of industries to improve the designs of manufacturable products. The higher reliance of optimisation software, used for instance in the automotive industry, highlights its importance for designing more efficient and refined mass-produced components. Post-processing of topology optimisation results (e.g. from variable density to manufacturable structures) does however remain a heavily heuristic process where the end-results (and consequently the “efficiency” of the optimised product) can vary significantly as a function of the individual designer/engineer. This “variation” coupled with the often-significant time associated with post-processing makes the use of topology optimisation prohibitive in certain instances.

In this paper, a systematic and repeatable three-step approach to automated post-processing of topology optimisation results for sheet metal manufacturing of automotive components will be introduced. The method, which has been implemented into a software tool, is mesh independent and can handle topology optimisation results in binary as well as variable density formats. The software contains three main steps; namely geometry refinement, re-analysis and manufacturability check. The methodology and software utilise a stencil method, for which the principles are described here. The main objective from this is to generate repeatable refined interpretations of optimisation results. In addition to presenting the actual methodology and software, this paper also investigates different parameter variations; such as geometry update sequence, search radii, stencil shape and type and their influence on the generated post-processed result. Definition of algorithm parameters is provided, together with suggested user-defined settings to enable the derivation of consistent refinements of the topology results.

拓扑优化是一个越来越重要的过程，用于各种行业以改进可制造产品的设计。例如，在汽车工业中使用的优化软件的依赖性更高，突出表明了其对于设计更高效，更精细的批量生产部件的重要性。但是，拓扑优化结果的后处理（例如，从可变密度到可制造的结构）的确是一个高度启发式的过程，最终结果（因此，优化产品的“效率”）可能会因个人设计者而异/工程师。这种“变化”以及与后处理相关的通常很长的时间，使得在某些情况下无法使用拓扑优化。

本文将介绍一种系统且可重复的三步方法，用于对汽车零部件的钣金制造中的拓扑优化结果进行自动后处理。该方法已实施到软件工具中，与网格无关，可以处理二进制和可变密度格式的拓扑优化结果。该软件包含三个主要步骤；即几何优化，重新分析和可制造性检查。该方法和软件使用模板法，此处将描述其原理。这样做的主要目的是对优化结果产生可重复的精确解释。除了介绍实际的方法和软件，本文还研究了不同的参数变化。例如几何图形更新顺序，搜索半径，模板的形状和类型及其对生成的后处理结果的影响。提供了算法参数的定义以及建议的用户定义设置，以实现对拓扑结果的一致改进。