An all-movable rudder designed by thermo-elastic topology optimization and manufactured by additive manufacturing

Abstract In high-speed vehicles, rudders often endure both aerodynamic pressure and thermal loads. The innovative design of rudders is of great importance for the performance of the whole vehicle. In this work, thermo-elastic topology optimization is adopted to design a typical all-movable rudder structure. The compliance of the rudder skin is considered to be a new objective and the moment of inertia of the rudder is constrained during optimization to ensure its fast response to instructions of the control system. Then sensitivity analysis of the structural compliance and the moment of inertia is carried out. Optimization results show that thermal load has a great effect on the optimized configuration and minimizing the compliance of the rudder skin gives much better design than minimizing the global compliance. Subsequently, an engineering-oriented post-processing is conducted to make the optimized design suitable for additive manufacturing. An appropriate printing direction is selected based on the layout of the optimized ribs and certain ribs are reshaped with fillets to make the rudder free of internal support structures. Besides, according to a secondary topology optimization of the ribs and the stress distribution, a set of powder-discharge holes are properly opened on the ribs so that all cavities within the rudder are connected and the metal powder inside the rudder can be discharged with little effort after manufacturing. Finally, the optimized design is successfully printed using Selective Laser Melting, demonstrating the proposed post-processing is effective for additive manufacturing.