In Additive Manufacturing (AM), typically a trade-off exists between part quality and build time. Part orientation with respect to the print direction may significantly influence both. In this thesis, the consequences of part orientation on support volume requirements are studied. Build time, material consumption, and post-processing efforts are influenced by the amount and configuration of required supports. Using triangular surface meshes, the support requirement for a given part orientation is calculated for each triangle facet individually and summed. Gradient descent methods are used to optimize part orientation for minimum support volume. To enable implementation of gradient descent optimization, focus is placed on obtaining derivative information of the support volume on a per-facet basis. The resulting support volume function contains discontinuities, for which smooth
approximation strategies are implemented. This approach is first applied to convex shapes, with promising results. For non-convex shapes however, non-local information is required. A novel method for indicating the presence of on-part supports is presented. All possible candidates for support on part are computed for each facet before the start of the optimization process. The resulting connectivity set is an inherent property of the shape and only requires calculation once. The new method is tested using numerical experiments, which indicate that gradient-based optimization of the smooth volume
function outperforms the population-based approaches commonly used in the literature. Moreover, the presented work provides a framework for optimizing total part cost in which other metrics are easily appended.

In Additive Manufacturing (AM), typically a trade-off exists between part quality and build time. Part orientation with respect to the print direction may significantly influence both. In this thesis, the consequences of part orientation on support volume requirements are studied. Build time, material consumption, and post-processing efforts are influenced by the amount and configuration of required supports. Using triangular surface meshes, the support requirement for a given part orientation is calculated for each triangle facet individually and summed. Gradient descent methods are used to optimize part orientation for minimum support volume. To enable implementation of gradient descent optimization, focus is placed on obtaining derivative information of the support volume on a per-facet basis. The resulting support volume function contains discontinuities, for which smooth
approximation strategies are implemented. This approach is first applied to convex shapes, with promising results. For non-convex shapes however, non-local information is required. A novel method for indicating the presence of on-part supports is presented. All possible candidates for support on part are computed for each facet before the start of the optimization process. The resulting connectivity set is an inherent property of the shape and only requires calculation once. The new method is tested using numerical experiments, which indicate that gradient-based optimization of the smooth volume
function outperforms the population-based approaches commonly used in the literature. Moreover, the presented work provides a framework for optimizing total part cost in which other metrics are easily appended.

As mechanisms become increasingly precise, so becomes the reduction of noise and vibration increasingly important. One method for eliminating vibrations in mechanisms is dynamic balancing. This method prevents vibrations from occurring by designing the mechanism such that the inertial forces and moments of all bodies in the mechanism cancel each other out kinematically. Generally, this is done by cleverly adding masses to existing mechanisms or by using symmetric mechanisms which move in opposite directions. Another method for the synthesis of mechanisms is topology optimization. This method can be used to design dynamically balanced mechanisms without the need for symmetry or redundant masses.

An algorithm is developed, based on the 99-line code, to synthesize such dynamically balanced mechanisms. As a test case, an off-centered (thereby usually unbalanced) force-inverter is designed, and a significant reduction in the shaking forces and shaking moments is achieved. The resulting geometries are analyzed in COMSOL to verify the results of the algorithm and perform further analyses on the performance of the algorithm.