Hands-free printed door opener to limit the spread of Coronavirus: Design through topology optimization

Recently, the necessity of reducing probability spread viruses has fostered creativity engineers to develop tools that would allow actions every-day life be executed differently. Moreover, maturity Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) technology and associated low costs allowed creative solutions produced used in real-life applications. A distinctive example is represented by common action opening a door. Since hands are typical vector contamination for such as Coronavirus, hands-free devices aim at making use existing structure kinematic complete same different fashion. Typically, mechanical manufacturing requirements these include suitable stiffness-to-mass ratio, reduced printing time well minimization supports which need removed post-printing phase. To tackle all dedicated topology optimization (TO) method can since preliminary design Several nature included problem formulation: ones, like mass stiffness, drawing direction or minimum member size. In this paper, feasibility study on 3D printed door opener been carried out means Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) TO its CAD-compatible variant, i.e., SIMP approach reformulated framework non-uniform rational basis spline hyper-surfaces. The identify optimal adapted real-case scenario wherein loading cases constraints evaluated. Different obtained, reconstructed compatible CAD environment optimized geometry numerically assessed. Finally, also evaluated respect indicators time, total filament required process.