These are the things I changed when designing the final brace: First, they needed to fit vertically into the MK3’s print volume, which the older ones did not at their original scale, I still wanted them to look cool, and I also wanted to use a better, more accurate and more detailed simulation setup. So I went on to design the actual braces that I would use at full scale. And these weren’t printed with, like super massive print settings or anything. The turquoise one was able to hold 24kg, loaded roughly at the center of gravity where actual folders would sit, the orange one 23kg and the gold one over 30kg. And looking at these 50% scale test prints, I was pretty confident they would hold up, because: So I was going for each brace being able to hold the weight of 10 fully loaded folders, like analogue document folders, which was going to be around 30, 35 kilograms. Half-scale testingĪnd they actually turned out pretty darn strong. You know, the classic way, actually mount them and break them. So to verify that that was actually viable, I printed three of the designs that way and tested them for strength. So I decided to try printing them with what was going to be the wall side against the bed, which is quite possibly the worst orientation for strength. So the original plan was to print these sideways to get maximum strength as that wouldn’t be pulling the layers apart, but I pretty quickly realized that the parts just wouldn’t be printable that way, at least not without a ton of supports and I didn’t want to go down that route. I think if I was paying for cloud credits, this would have been well over 100 bucks just in cloud costs. You can then “promote” the results either into a new simulation for checking whether the part is actually strong enough for what you’ve got planned for it or into the model workspace, where you can edit and export the mesh. When that’s done, you get a model that, as I understand it, has all the bits removed that, per volume, contribute less than half as much to rigidity and strength than what the most important bits contribute. After that, all that’s left to do is to create the mesh and to run the simulation. You head over to the Simulation workspace, select your original body, define where it makes contact with “the outside world”, usually that’s just fixing the screw holes in place, then you define where the part will see loads from that outside world, and if you want to, you can also tell Fusion which parts it should definitely keep using these green blocker shapes. Taking that design to a topology optimized version is actually pretty simple in Fusion. I knew the rough shape that I wanted, it should have a bit of a swooping shape on the bottom, two mounting holes out the back and it should fit flat on the bed of a MK3. Says the guy who literally lives in an IKEA catalogue. I’m sure these are actually way stronger than anything that you would reasonably throw at them. Or buy the same thing ready-made for 3 bucks from IKEA. I mean, sure, they should be able to hold up a few folders and all, but it would be pretty easy to just design something with simpler geometry or, heck, even just throw together a few sticks of hardwood. My goal with these was to make them look cool, not necessarily to make them as strong as possible. Only option for me: Topology optimization On top of the subscription you’re already paying for. And then, if you actually want to get that design off of Autodesk’s servers, it’s another 100 cloud credits, so yes, another 100 bucks. Generative design is only included in the paid version, and even then running a single generative design costs you 25 cloud credits. But hey, at least they don’t charge free users cloud credits for it. You can only run it on Autodesk’s “cloud” servers, unfortunately, which means my 16-core CPU is bored to death while some server in Autodesk’s farm dedicates two cores and what feels like the bottom spot in a queue to run my simulation. I think for 3D printing, Topology Optimization is by far the easier one to make use of – if your input geometry is printable when it comes to size, overhangs, all that, usually the output geometry will be printable, too, maybe not perfectly, but printable enough.Īnd, most importantly, topology optimization is actually included in the free Maker and Startup license of Fusion360. Generative design, on the other hand, works the exact opposite way: You start with only the material that you absolutely need, like flanges and mounts, and then the software adds all the connecting geometry by itself. So topology optimization, you start with something and then take away what’s not needed.
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