Development Workflow for Manifolds and Fluid Components Based on Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Abstract

Through its unique characteristics, additive manufacturing yields great potential for designing fluid components with increased performance characteristics. These potentials in advanced design, functional structure, and manufacturing are not easily realized. Therefore, the present study proposes a holistic development methodology for fluid components with a specific focus on hydraulic manifolds. The methodology aims to lead the designer from the specification of the task, through a step-by-step embodied design, to a technical and economic evaluation of the optimized, first-time manufactured part. A case study applies the proposed methodology to a part of a rail-vehicle braking application. Through its application, a significant reduction in weight, size, as well as significant contributions to the company’s AM strategy can be assigned to the part. At the same time, increased direct manufacturing costs are identified. Based on the increased performance characteristics of the resulting design and the holistic foundation of the subsequent economic decisions, a satisfying efficiency can be allocated to the proposed methodology.

Design for Additive Manufacturing: Methods and Tools

“…The study demonstrates that this approach can be advantageous, especially in the early stages of the design process. Rolinck et al [11] presented a holistic design and development methodology for hydraulic manifolds and fluid components with improved product performance and optimised for Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF). Lastly, in a comparative study, Ikeuchi et al [14] developed a new artificial neural network model to create a data-efficient modelling approach for simulating cold spray additive manufacturing.…”

“…The overall DfAM strategy presented in Figure ?? is the lighthouse for other methods conceived for specific problems and products [1,[7][8][9][10][11].…”

Additive Manufacturing of Hydraulic Components - Pressure Loss Comparison of Different Self-Supporting Channel Geometries

“…[15] Some of these guidelines are even specifically adapted to manifolds. [16] However, neither these guidelines nor the "Design for additive Manufacturing" (DfAM) [17] provide concrete rules for individual case decisions [18]. For example, if a circular cross-sectional area is not horizontally printable, various self-supporting channel geometries are available.…”

A novel design model of flow channel paths for additive manufacturing

“…Additive manufacturing (AM) increases the design freedom of parts (Bikas et al, 2019;Xiong et al, 2022), especially for parts with flow channels (Zhang et al, 2020). As mentioned in a literature (Biedermann et al, 2022), these parts include hydraulic manifolds (Diegel et al, 2020;Alshare et al, 2019;Rolinck et al, 2021;Arena et al, 2023;Schmelzle et al, 2015), nozzles (Biedermann and Meboldt, 2020;Gradl and Protz, 2020), injection moulds with conformal channels (Çalis kan et al, 2023;Gao et al, 2021) and heat exchangers (Dixit et al, 2022;Liang et al, 2023). Compared to conventional manufacturing methods for flow channels, hydraulic flow channels based on AM design have many advantages (Biedermann et al, 2022).…”

“…While fully leveraging the advantages of AM, the design methods of hydraulic components are also undergoing changes. Some of the early studies on AM hydraulic components retained the original layout of the connectors and valves and were manually designed directly on the basis of conventional hydraulic components (Alshare et al, 2019;Arena et al, 2023;Rolinck et al, 2021). Some scholars manually redesigned the internal flow channels of conventional hydraulic valves to reduce pressure loss and performed topology optimization (TO) on the valve block to reduce its mass (Li et al, 2021;Xie et al, 2020).…”