Automatic optimisation layout design approach for lightweight and energy-saving additive manufactured hydraulic manifolds

Abstract

Additive manufacturing provides advanced technology for producing lightweight and energy-saving hydraulic manifolds. However, current design of additive manufactured hydraulic manifolds relies on manual experience. This study develops a multi-objective optimisation layout design approach to automatically achieve the design of lightweight and energy-saving hydraulic manifolds. The design approach has three parts: (1) a flattened design strategy is introduced to minimise the design difficulty of hydraulic manifolds; (2) a multi-objective performance evaluation function of layout design approach is proposed to establish the relationship between manifolds mass, pressure loss, volume and its layout; (3) a greedy strategy optimisation algorithm is used to automatically find out a global optimum manifold layout based on multi-objective performance evaluation function. Finally, the design approach is applied to optimise a traditional hydraulic manifold. The weight, volume, and pressure loss of the optimised additive manufactured one are reduced by 84%, 44%, and 40%, illustrating the effectiveness of design approach.

Keywords

• Hydraulic manifold
• additive manufacturing
• layout design
• lightweight
• energy-saving