Abstract

Evolution of numerical solutions has changed the product analysis across industries significantly. It has successfully made it possible, to analyse and optimize the products in a faster and cheaper way. CFD simulation is a numerical solution that predict fluid flow behaviour in or around an object. It exists now for several decades and is widely used across various industries mainly by the product analysts or simulations engineers, primarily to improve phenomenon, like flow-separation, turbulent jet behaviour, pressure drop, aeroacoustics etc. In the recent years, a revolutionary usage of this numerical approach has come to existence, i.e., to provide the potential of CFD further upstream in the product development processes. The idea is to make CFD technology available to the Design Engineers. This CFD integrated CAD approach facilitates designers to move back and forth between designs and corresponding analysis, to make fast, sustainable and cost efficient choices and move the design to its optimum self. Instead of creating the initial design manually and fine-tune it later, the designer could alternatively start with a topology optimization approach which delivers an innovative design concepts tailored to the local flow physics. In order to enable the CAD designer to go smoothly through the CFD and optimization setup, a wizard-based approach should be chosen. Moreover, the applied physic should mostly be predefined and the mesh creation happens ideally without user interaction. Within this paper, a topology optimization tool will be presented which fulfils the above-mentioned requirements. The potential of the tool will be demonstrated by going through an optimization task for a hydraulic manifold block. Hydraulic manifolds are applied to regulate fluid flow between pumps and actuators and other components. They are often exposed to high fluid pressures resulting in a highly loaded structure. Therefore, a conservative concept is usually taken leading to a significant weight of the manifold part. The goal of this task is to provide a lighter design concept with improved flow behaviour. In a first step, a flow topology optimization is done, which provides an improved ductwork at low pressure drop and without recirculation. After that, a structure topology optimization of the surrounding solid is applied within the same working environment to minimize the mass for given constraints. For this step, the fluid pressure distribution along the optimized duct walls is taken as load condition. The outcome of this twostep procedure is a design with a significant reduction in weight and pressure drop.