Piston of a spark-ignition engine produced by additive manufacturing

The first objective of this thesis was compiling research about currently produced pistons for internal combustion engines and about additive manufacturing and based on the acquired information deciding which type of piston makes the most of the advantages. Following this research, the next step was creating a design adjustment of a piston, which was previously designed with the conventional methods of manufacturing in mind, in a way that would make the best use of the different possibilities of additive manufacturing. There was also an optimisation carried out, which depicted the densities of material elements in the piston, showing where the material was less important. There were three variants of the additive manufactured piston created, ranging from a relatively conservative design, which could be theoretically produced by conventional methods with a more substantial subtraction of material added, to a design which could only be produced via additive manufacturing. A thermo-structural analysis at maximum engine load was carried out for all these piston models. Based on these data, a conclusion was made, whether the use of additive manufacturing was justified over the use of the conventional subtractive methods