I am currently working on a model made of sheet metal, and would like to run a generative design study on it for reduction of weight and aesthetics. Is there a way to run a generative design study on a bent piece of sheet metal, and keep it at a uniform thickness so that can be converted back into sheet metal and un-folded after the design is finished, as well as keeping the design so it can be manufactured by being laser cut and then folded.
Here is an image of my design:
Good question! I wish the answer was "yes"...it's something I've been itching to do myself for quite a while now. Unfortunately we do not yet support sheet metal in generative design.
What you could do in this situation is to pick one face of your sheet metal design space, make all the others into preserves, and use 2-axis cutting to generatively design the one face (you might also need to provide additional obstacles to keep material from growing thicker than your sheet thickness). Something like this:
Where yellow is the starting shape, green are preserves, and red is an obstacle. Once you get the top face generative output, you could do a second pass where you include the top face result as a preserve and have generative create the side flanges using the same method.
Thanks for pushing the envelope!
Ben
Hi @andy.s.davies ,
Thanks for your question! I can't share specifics, but we're aware of many customers who would love a sheet metal generative solution and we've been listening. Turns out it's a really tough problem, but one I'm really interested in getting a solution for when we can!
Ben
