Creating parts from stress lines

Aside from topology optimization which has been addressed in a different post (here), parts can also be created using stress lines. To derive stress lines, a 2D FEA code was used (link here). I chose a design space and imposed boundary conditions as well as loads.

Once everything had been defined, the design space was discretized, and the FEA code was run. The code gave the Von Mises stresses values at all the different nodes. Those nodal values were used to interpolate the stress values over the entire domain.

I also obtained the principal stresses from the code, and I have plotted the resulting stress field.

The stress field was interpolated across the whole domain. The advantage of having a stress field is that I can start from a random point, draw a segment in the direction given by the stress field at that starting point; this will lead me to another point, where I'll do the same thing (over a fixed number of iterations). I used some of the boundary points as starting points. The resulting lines were then smoothed using Bezier Curves.

The resulting lines have then be thickened, extruded, and rendered using Rhino3D, Grasshopper3D, and Blender.