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Description
Lightweighting of power transmission components manufactured using Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) demands architectures that combine structural compliance with high load-carrying capacity. Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) integrated within the gear body offer superior stiffness-to-weight ratios and enhanced vibration damping. However, discretizing and transferring highly complex implicit architectures into non-linear finite element solvers without loss of topological fidelity remains a significant engineering barrier. Standard boundary-representation (B-rep) exports often introduce surface approximations and mesh distortions that undermine numerical convergence during tooth contact analyses.
This study presents a dedicated digital workflow connecting generative implicit modeling in nTopology directly to structural simulation in Ansys Workbench via APDL-compliant common database structures (.cdb). By generating optimized volume meshes natively on implicit field representations and circumventing intermediate surface reconstructions, geometric accuracy at thin-walled TPMS boundaries is strictly preserved while significantly streamlining computational setup.
The developed methodology was applied to evaluate the structural behavior and tooth stiffness of lightweight gear wheels. A comparative series of numerical calculations was performed, taking into account various cell topologies and outer shell thicknesses, benchmarking lightweight designs against solid gear configurations for 316L steel. The results demonstrate the significant impact that the wall thickness and core topology have on the stiffness of gear teeth, providing quantifiable criteria for mitigating stress concentrations. The established simulation process provides a repeatable and computationally efficient framework for structural optimization and qualification of additively manufactured gears prior to experimental testing.