Structure-material Integrated Design for a Spacecraft Rib

It is the goal that the aerospace industry has been continuously pursuing to meet the lightweight design with excellent mechanical properties. A structure-material integrated design framework is proposed to enhance the load-bearing rate of a spacecraft rib significantly, based on the optimization design theory. The structure-material integrated design framework is realized in two steps by commercial software Altair Solidthinking Inspire. The first step is that topology optimization is performed to a spacecraft rib at the macroscopic scale, with the minimum mass and the constraints of the additive manufacturing process and stress; while the second step is to optimally infill the lattice structure at the microscopic scale by minimizing the mass and constraining the additive manufacturing process and stress. Representative samples for the optimal rib structure are then fabricated by the additive manufacturing technique, and the tensile test is finally carried out to obtained the load-bearing rate for the different samples. The results show that the spacecraft rib's load-bearing rate is increased by 122.73% by the proposed structure-material integrated design framework compared to the traditional one; moreover, it is significantly more efficient than the direct topology optimization and lattice optimization design. The structure-material integrated design framework shown in this study can provide an efficient way to aerospace structures with lightweight and superior mechanical properties.