Design for AM the key to the industrialization of additive manufacturing

Olad Diegel

Abstract

Many industries approach additive manufacturing (AM) as a drop-in replacement for conventional manufacturing tech­nologies. This approach, however, does not fully utilize the unique possibilities that additive processes offer. For over thirty years, AM has been extensively used as a rapid proto­typing technology. When using the technologies for man­ufacturing, however, it should be noted that AM does not remove all manufacturing restrictions. It, instead, replaces them with a different set of design considerations that de­signers must take into account if they wish to successfully use the technologies to add value to their products. Other­wise AM can easily become a slow and uneconomical way of manufacturing products or parts. It is also of great impor­tance to understand that, despite much of the marketing hype over the past few decades, AM is not an “easy” tech­nology that can make absolutely anything. It requires a good understanding of the different technologies and how to de­sign for them. In fact, printing parts in metal, for example, can be downright hard, and the use of AM to manufacture metal parts should only be considered if the process truly adds value to the product. This talk attempts to impart some practical guidance on the thought process required to design parts that gain the maxi­mum benefit from what AM can offer.