Designing a high-strength node is significant for space structures. Topological optimization can optimally allocate the material distribution of components to meet performance requirements. Although the material distribution after topology optimization is optimum, the structure becomes complicated to manufacture. By using additive manufacturing technology, this problem can be well solved. At present, both topology optimization technology and additive manufacturing technology are quite mature, but their application in the design of spatial nodes is very recent and less researched. This paper involves the study and improvement of the node optimization design–manufacturing integrated method. This study used the BESO optimization algorithm as the research algorithm. Through a reasonable improvement of the material interpolation method, the algorithm’s dependence on the experience of selecting the material penalty index P was reduced. On this basis, the secondary development was carried out, and a multisoftware integration was carried out for optimization and manufacturing. The spatial node was taken as the research object, and the calculation results of the commercial finite element software were compared. The comparison showed that the algorithm used in this paper was better. Not only was it not trapped in a local optimum, but the maximum stress was also lower. In addition, this paper proposed a practical finite element geometric model extraction method and smoothing of the optimized nodes, completing the experiment of the additive manufacturing forming of the nodes. It provides ideas for processing jagged edges brought by the BESO algorithm. This paper verified the feasibility of the multisoftware integration method of optimized manufacturing.

Optimization methods tailored for practical engineering applications continue to evolve in order to realize lightweight single-layer reticulated shell structures and maximize node stiffness. This paper takes the minimum amount of steel as the objective function, and divides the rod types into three groups and three corresponding one-to-one optimization schemes. Considering the stress and stiffness of the rod and the displacement and stability constraints of the whole structure, the equal step search method combined with the criterion method is used to optimize the rod size. Then the multi-scale calculation model based on the multi-point constraint method is established. Through calculation and analysis, the boundary load condition of the target node is obtained as the boundary condition of node optimization. Finally, the variable density method is used to optimize the topology of the node domain, and the minimum member size is included in the constraint conditions to obtain the optimized node form that is conducive to additive manufacturing. The research shows that reasonable cross-section value and grouping of members can effectively reduce the steel consumption without compromising the overall stability performance. The amount of steel used in the three optimization plans was reduced by 12%, 23%, and 28%, respectively, compared to before the optimization. The multi-scale model not only takes into account the calculation accuracy, but also can effectively simulate the stress conditions in the node domain. The development of topology optimization and additive manufacturing technology broadens the space for optimization design, and provides new ideas for advanced design to integrate intelligent manufacturing.