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The purpose of this paper is to propose a design method for additive manufacturing (AM) hydraulic valves based on valve body structural decomposition. The method aims to achieve the design of a hydraulic valve with minimum mass or maximum stiffness or minimum pressure loss that also satisfies the structural strength requirements.

Decompose the hydraulic valve into typical feature structures and functional structures. Generative design (GD) tools are used to perform GD on the typical feature structures while considering loads and constraints. Based on the GD results, automatically design flow channels with variable wall thickness driven by fluid pressure. The GD results under different design objectives are combined with the automatically designed variable wall thickness channels to obtain hydraulic valves with different performance characteristics.

The case study section redesigned and manufactured a minimum mass fuel regulator valve. Compared to the conventional fuel regulator valve, the mass of the redesigned valve was reduced by 77%, the pressure loss was reduced by 40% and the flow rate was increased by 38%.

The value of this work is the combination of structural and flow optimization, as well as the design of flow channels with variable wall thickness. The proposed method contributes a novel solution to the design of AM hydraulic valves.

This paper aims to propose a method for automatic design of additive manufacturing (AM) flow channel paths driven by path length and pressure loss. The research focuses on the automatic design of channel paths, intending to achieve the shortest flow channel length or minimum pressure loss and improve the design efficiency of AM parts.

The initial layout of the flow channels is redesigned to consider the channels print supports. Boundary conditions and constraints are defined according to the redesigned channels layout, and the equation consisting of channel length and pressure loss is used as the objective function. Then the path planning simulation is performed based on particle swarm algorithm. The proposed method describes the path of flow channels using spline cures. The spline curve is controlled by particle (one particle represents a path), and the particle is randomly generated within the design space. After the path planning simulation is completed, the generated paths are used to create 3D parts.

Case study 1 demonstrates the automatic design of hydraulic spool valve. Compared to conventional spool valve, the pressure loss was reduced by 86% and the mass was reduced by 83%. The design results of case study 2 indicate that this approach is able to find the shortest channel path with lower computational cost.

The automatic design method of flow channel paths driven by path length and pressure loss presented in this paper provides a novel solution for the creation of AM flow components.