A Design-Validation-Production Workflow for Aerospace Additive Manufacturing

There is a lot of hype these days regarding Additive Manufacturing (AM) or 3D Printing. Are companies seriously
looking at this technology to make real parts for actual applications? For the aerospace industry, the hype is starting
to become more real. Applications include non-structural parts, replacement parts for aging systems, jet engine
components, and satellite structures. A key question now is can these AM parts be certified? For certification
of aerospace parts, one needs to certify the design, the manufacturing process, and the inspection protocols.
Certifying Additive Manufactured parts is no different but the manufacturing process is much different and the
designs are often not easy to analyze using traditional stress analysis methods. Altair worked with our partner
Datapoint Labs to define a process one could use to design and certify an aerospace component.

With Additive Manufacturing, there is the opportunity to build a solid model, optimize its shape using topology
optimization, and then directly print the design. In order to accomplish this, material properties from the selected
additive manufacturing process are obtained, a test article is printed and tested and compared to a finite element
model simulation of the part and test. This provides the required information to carry out a design optimization
exercise for an existing aerospace part that will now be produced by a metal AM process.

Validation Study
A modified Cornell bike crank was chosen as the validation article. The workflow is shown in Figure 1. An EOS
Aluminum AlSi10Mg gas atomized powder from EOS GmbH was chosen as the material with an EOS 280 Selective
Laser Melting (SLM) machine used to produce the parts and samples. Three samples of the bike crank were
produced along with a number of test specimens. The test specimens were tested to generate the material property
curves. Elastic properties along with failure strains were produced. This material data was then used to simulate
the bike crank to failure. The testing of the bike cranks used a Digital Image Correlation (DIC) method to visualize
strains on the part during testing. The simulation results compared favorably with test data in regards to failure
location and failure load.

Firgure 1: Validation of bike crank: AM print layout > Material properties from test coupons > Test set up for bike crank >
Test (top) vs. simulation (bottom) strain maps > Test (top) vs. simulation (bottom) failure response
Application to Aerospace
The example chosen is a 172 Cessna rear elevator bellcrank . The project goal is to optimize the part for weight
based off the maximum allowable load input, while ensuring the part has a Factor of Safety of 2 and a maximum
deflection of 3.8mm. The process is shown in Figure 2. The existing bellcrank is shown which is a solid plate. With
the material properties generated and validated with the bike crank, the design was optimized using solidThinking
Inspire to produce a lower weight design concept that met all of the engineering and performance requirements
established. The design was then produced using the same EOS AlSi10Mg material and process as for the bike
crank samples. The additively manufactured bellcrank was then set up for DIC testing and then the strain results
from the test were compared with the strain results from the simulation with reasonable correlation between test
and simulation.

Figure 2. Design optimization, printing and testing of bell crank: Original bell crank design > Optimized bell crank design >
Test set up > Comparison of strain from simulation (left) vs. test (right)

Results
The optimized bellcrank resulted in a 45% mass savings while meeting the performance requirements of the
component. Topology optimization combined with additive manufacturing can significantly reduce weight of
aerospace components without increasing costs. For low-volume production parts, the elimination of tooling costs
can actually reduce the costs of these parts while reducing the weight making for a very compelling business case
for these technologies. This study demonstrated a methodology that can be used to validate and certify additively
manufactured and optimized aerospace components.

A more detailed review of this study can be found at www.altair.com and www.datapointlabs.com.

To learn more about the products listed above, visit www.altairhyperworks.com.

Article Written By: Robert Yancey