Design and Development of High-Speed Rotating Impeller for Turbo- Molecular Pump Through Topology Optimisation

Additive Manufacturing (AM) process has potential to manufacture complex structures to cater the design requirement and process requirement for any specific application. However, this process is expensive as compared to the traditional and on-going advanced manufacturing process. The cost of AM process depends on volume/mass and size of the parts, and due to this, the AM manufactured part needs to be topologically optimised before manufacturing. In view of this, the manufacturer has to ensure the functionality and acceptability of design parameters about the computer aided design (CAD) model through a reliable numerical modelling technique for the topology optimisation (TO). Moreover, the CAD model also needs to be compatible for ease of manufacturing by AM process which is possible by post analysis and CAD modification. In the present paper, TO was implemented for a high-speed rotating impeller of a turbo-molecular pump (TMP) followed by manufacturing to achieve better performance.