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Design for Additive Manufacturing

Cambridge and Loughborough University
 

In review, submitted to the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design 2017 (ICED17), 21-25 August 2017, Vancouver, Canada.

 

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has enjoyed rapid development over the past decade and improved process capability brings attractive potentials for direct manufacturing of end use components and products. This opens a new avenue for designers to design a much wider variety of products in a more time and cost effective way. However, the vast majority of the design methods and rules presented to date focus on the feature level, which are specifically applied at the detail design stage to ensure the manufacturability of the features for a given AM process. This does not enable designers to fully benefit from unique AM capabilities. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that holistically considers design freedoms, AM advantages and limitations for designing end use products, providing guidance throughout process selection and different design stages. The major considerations in the design process are addressed, showing effective ways of making use of AM.