Case Study of Additively Manufactured Mountain Bike Stem

Filip Véle; Michal Ackermann; Jakub Macháček; Jiří Šafka

doi:10.3390/ma16134717

Case Study of Additively Manufactured Mountain Bike Stem

Materials (Basel). 2023 Jun 29;16(13):4717. doi: 10.3390/ma16134717.

Authors

Filip Véle¹, Michal Ackermann², Jakub Macháček², Jiří Šafka²

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Liberec, Studentská 1402/2, 461 17 Liberec, Czech Republic.
² The Institute for Nanomaterials, Advanced Technologies and Innovation, Technical University of Liberec, Studentská 1402/2, 461 17 Liberec, Czech Republic.

Abstract

This article is focused on a case study of the topology optimisation of a bike stem manufactured by selective laser melting (SLM) additive technology. Topology optimisation was used as a design tool to model a part with less material used for transferring specific loads than the conventional method. For topology optimisation, Siemens NX 12 software was used with loads defined from the ISO 4210-5 standard. Post-processing of the topology-optimised shape was performed in Altair Inspire software. For this case study, the aluminium alloy AlSi10Mg was selected. For qualitative evaluation, the mechanical properties of the chosen alloy were measured on the tensile specimens. The design of the new bike stem was evaluated by Ansys FEA software with static loadings defined by ISO 4210-5. The functionality of the additively manufactured bike stem was confirmed by actual experiments defined by ISO 4210-5. The resulting new design of the bike stem passed both static tests and is 7.9% lighter than that of the reference.

Keywords: additive manufacturing; bike stem; selective laser melting; topology optimisation.

Grants and funding

This publication was written at the Technical University of Liberec as part of the project (SGS-2021-5013) “Processing of H13 tool steel by SLM technology and research of lattice structures” with the support of the Specific University Research Grant, as provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in the year 2021. It was partialy funded by the programme H2020-WIDESPREAD under the project “Networking For Research and Development of Human Interactive and Sensitive Robotics Taking Advantage of Additive Manufacturing” (R2P2, ID: 857061).