Matías Godoy

Le 29 janv. 2026

Titre : The accessibility constraint: application to supports in additive manufacturing.

Résumé : The accessibility constraint is a geometric constraint with applications on shape and topology optimization of structures built by additive manufacturing. The motivation comes from the use of supports to maintain a structure. Once the building stage is finished, the supports are of no more use and should be removed. Such a removal can be very difficult or even impossible if the supports are hidden inside the complex geometry of the structure. A rule of thumb for evaluating the ease of support removal is to ask that the contact zone between the structure and its supports can be accessed from the exterior by a straight line which does not cross another part of the structure. We propose a new mathematical approach to evaluate such an accessibility constraint, which is based on distance functions. The main advantage is the possibility of computing its shape derivative by the adjoint method. We numerically demonstrate in 2D and 3D that, in the context of the level-set method for topology optimization, our algorithm can optimize simultaneously the mechanical performance of a structure and the accessibility of its building supports, guaranteeing its additive manufacturing. This is a joint work with G. Allaire, M. Bihr and B. Bogosel.