Research supporting principles for design for additive manufacturing

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies enable the fabrication of parts and devices that are geometrically complex, have graded material compositions, and can be customised. To take advantage of these capabilities, it is important to guide engineering designers through the various issues that are unique to AM. We explore the range of principles that are relevant to Design For Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) in this paper. These include ideas about generating designs that cannot be fabricated using conventional methods to understanding the realities of existing machines and materials to micro-scale issues related to material microstructures and resulting process variations. Comments about standardisation efforts in the ASTM and ISO organisations are also included.

Keywords:

• additive manufacturing
• design for additive manufacturing
• design guidelines

Acknowledgments

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, USA. Thanks go to Mahmoud Alzahrani and Dr. Seung-Kyum Choi, Georgia Institute of Technology, for the topology optimisation example in Figure 1 and Jim Williams, 3D Systems, for fabricating the UAV in Figure 2.

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [grant number CMMI-1200788].

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [grant number CMMI-1200788].