Innovative AM Design Strategies for Integrating Carbon Fibre Composites with Metallic Structures to Support Lightweight Manufacturing
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Currently, aluminium-based mechanical products are optimized for lightweight characteristics using methods such as topology optimisation or generative designing without compromising on the performance. Additive manufacturing has been playing a vital part in the production of such complex designs. Recent inclusion of high-performance carbon fibre composites (CFC) in the list of additively manufacturable materials is certainly an advantage to achieve lighter and stronger products. The properties of CFC resonate along or even surpasses aluminium in terms of strength-to-weight ratio. Conversely, total replacement of aluminium with whole CFC-based designs is not feasible for applications where heat dissipation is critically required. The solution is to combine individual characteristics of aluminium and CFC in designs which is possible via multi-material approach. However, the process of integrating CFC in design models is not straightforward. There are challenges associated with proper placement of metal and CFC in the design models in order to comply with the manufacturing processes while also satisfying the performance characteristics of the products. These should be taken into account during the development of metal-CFC based multi-material designs. This research study highlights and addresses such challenges by practicing certain design strategies with application on real-world use-cases. This is achievable by coupling CAD development process with; (1) Finite Element Analysis (FEA) which suggests individual placements of metal and CFC with proper orientations, and (2) keeping in account the manufacturability of CFC such as printability limitations in terms of process parameters or limitations with topology optimized features. The proper fibres placement and orientation results in a stiffer, stronger and lighter metal-CFC multi-material design. This design approach extracts the full potential of this multi-material combination.