The past few decades have seen substantial growth in Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies. However, this growth has mainly been process-driven. The evolution of engineering design to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by AM and to manage the constraints associated with the technology has lagged behind. This paper presents the major opportunities, constraints, and economic considerations for Design for Additive Manufacturing. It explores issues related to design and redesign for direct and indirect AM production. It also highlights key industrial applications, outlines future challenges, and identifies promising directions for research and the exploitation of AM's full potential in industry.

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Design for additive manufacturing: trends, opportunities, considerations, and constraints

Design for manufacture and assembly (DFM) has typically meant that designers should tailor their designs to eliminate manufacturing difficulties and minimize manufacturing, assembly, and logistics costs. However, the capabilities of additive manufacturing technologies provide an opportunity to rethink DFM to take advantage of the unique capabilities of these technologies. As mentioned in Chap. 16, several companies are now using AM technologies for production manufacturing. For example, Siemens, Phonak, Widex, and the other hearing aid manufacturers use selective laser sintering and stereolithography machines to produce hearing aid shells; Align Technology uses stereolithography to fabricate molds for producing clear dental braces (“aligners”); and Boeing and its suppliers use polymer powder bed fusion (PBF) to produce ducts and similar parts for F-17 fighter jets. For hearing aids and dental aligners, AM machines enable manufacturing of tens to hundreds of thousands of parts, where each part is uniquely customized based upon person-specific geometric data. In the case of aircraft components, AM technology enables low-volume manufacturing, easy integration of design changes and, at least as importantly, piece part reductions to greatly simplify product assembly.

Design for Additive Manufacturing

FDM process parameters influence over the mechanical properties of polymer specimens: A review

The evolution and future of manufacturing: A review

Laser based additive manufacturing in industry and academia

Additive Manufacturing technologies create parts layer by layer. Thereby, lots of benefits are offered. Especially extended design freedoms provide new potentials for the design of technical parts. To make these benefits accessible to different user groups, design rules for Additive Manufacturing were developed within the project “Direct Manufacturing Design Rules”. Therefore a process independent method was defined first. Next, design rules were developed for Laser Sintering, Laser Melting and Fused Deposition Modeling. The results were summarized in a design rule catalog and support a suitable design for Additive Manufacturing.

Design for Additive Manufacturing—Element transitions and aggregated structures

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present Design Rules for additive manufacturing and a method for their development. Design/methodology/approach – First, a process-independent method for the development of Design Rules was worked out. Therefore, geometrical standard elements and attributes that characterize the elements’ shapes have been defined. Next, the standard elements have been manufactured with different attribute values with Laser Sintering, Laser Melting and Fused Deposition Modeling, and their geometrical quality was examined. From the results, Design Rules for additive manufacturing were derived and summarized in a catalogue. Findings – Due to the process independent method, Design Rules were developed that apply for the different considered additive manufacturing technologies equally. These Design Rules are completely function-independent and easily transferable to individual part designs. Research limitations/implications – The developed Design Rules can only apply for the considered...

On design for additive manufacturing: evaluating geometrical limitations

Dimensional Tolerances for Additive Manufacturing: Experimental Investigation for Fused Deposition Modeling

Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, is a relatively new technology which enables the toolless production of components and entire assemblies directly from a CAD file. Today, the technology is still not widely used in industrial production. It is mainly limited to special applications, although it shows great potential. In this paper, first approaches are shown to apply AM to the production of rotors for permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM). The possibilities of a lightweight design with a low moment of inertia as well as the influence on the magnetic anisotropy for an improved sensorless control of PMSM are pointed out. The results clearly demonstrate the great potential of additive manufacturing in electrical engineering applications.

Additive Manufacturing of a lightweight rotor for a permanent magnet synchronous machine

Additive manufacturing creates parts in layers and without formative tools. Thereby, new freedoms and restrictions arise. To publish these, comprehensive design rules are required. Such design rules were developed in the Direct Manufacturing Design Rules (DMDR) project. Because the validity of these design rules was limited to only a few considered boundary conditions, the Direct Manufacturing Design Rules 2.0 project has the aim to extend the range of validity. Therefore, the tests of the DMDR project were repeated with various machines, materials and parameters. As result, a design rule catalogue for various boundary conditions is given.

Guido Adam

Papers

Design for Additive Manufacturing—Element transitions and aggregated structures

On design for additive manufacturing: evaluating geometrical limitations

Dimensional Tolerances for Additive Manufacturing: Experimental Investigation for Fused Deposition Modeling

Additive Manufacturing of a lightweight rotor for a permanent magnet synchronous machine

Direct Manufacturing Design Rules