Computer aided generative design with overall thickness control to facilitate manufacturing and structural performance

A system comprising:

• a non-transitory storage medium having instructions stored thereon;
• and
• one or more data processing apparatus configured to run the instructions to perform operations comprising:
• obtaining one or more boundary conditions and one or more design criteria, including a minimum thickness value, for a modeled object to be produced;
• iteratively modifying a geometry of a three-dimensional shape of the modeled object in accordance with the one or more design criteria and the one or more boundary conditions to produce a three-dimensional computer-aided design model of the modeled object, wherein the geometry of the three dimensional shape is represented in computer memory by a discretized volume having density values or distance-to-boundary values assigned to discrete cells of the discretized volume, and the iteratively modifying comprises, in each of multiple iterations of the iteratively modifying, performing operations comprising
• measuring a current thickness of the modeled object by calculating a non-dimensional quantity that uses a current volume and a current surface area of the three-dimensional shape defined by the density values or the distance-to-boundary values assigned to the discrete cells of the discretized volume in the computer memory, wherein the calculating does not include evaluating thickness at multiple points within the three-dimensional shape, thereby reducing computation time for the measuring and avoiding any computational failure at an individual point within the three-dimensional shape, and
• modifying the density values or the distance-to-boundary values assigned to the discrete cells of the discretized volume in the computer memory to update the geometry of the three-dimensional shape based on a difference between the current thickness and the minimum thickness value, making one or more portions of the three-dimensional shape thinner while also keeping the current thickness of the modeled object above the minimum thickness value, thereby preventing production of thin regions in the three-dimensional computer-aided design model that would result in structural performance degradation or manufacturing difficulties for the modeled object,
• until the geometry of the three-dimensional shape converges to a stable solution or a predefined number of shape modification iterations have been performed;
• and
• providing the three-dimensional computer-aided design model of the modeled object.