Designing parts for 3D printing

Additive manufacturing is increasingly used in product design and product manufacturing. For adoption of 3D printing to continue to increase several aspects need to develop in parallel. Obviously the cost of materials and machines needs to come down and the processes themselves need to develop further and improve. Designers also need to understand how to design parts for additive manufacturing. Design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) is as important as anything else for increasing adoption. Unless designers understand the opportunities and constraints of the processes and materials then the parts they design will never take full advantage of the freedom and capabilities on offer.

There are three approaches to design parts and products for 3D printing;

Replicate - here you just take the old part and print it via an additive manufacturing process without any or minimal changes to the part design. This is generally the least effective way of incorporating additive manufacturing into your current manufacturing or product design process. Parts originally designed to be manufactured via some other conventional manufacturing process have generally been designed within the constraints of said process' scope of what is and isn’t possible. They have or should have been optimized for these processes and a lot of the geometry might be there just to facilitate being made. This means, just taking an old design, converting to an .stl and firing it off to be printed somewhere is going to result in a slower, more expensive part. So unless by some fluke, the original design was better suited for 3D printing, you are not going to see any of the advantages it can offer.

Re-engineer – this is a better approach when looking to incorporate 3D printing into your current processes. Here you take the original design and look to optimize it for 3D printing whilst maintaining most of the original geometry and function. From a design and engineering perspective this is possibly the easiest and quickest approach to optimizing the design and taking advantage of some of the benefits of AM. By looking to the strengths of AM for improvement you may be able to re-engineer for lighter weight and increased performance. It might be possible to reduce time to manufacture and also achieve other time and cost savings through part consolidation or rapid manufacturing.

Re-imagine – this is the approach started with AM in mind. Almost designed in reverse, from function to part. These are parts designed for additive manufacturing, which draw on the process’ unique advantages and capabilities. The design will be different depending on the exact process you are looking to use, the material and function required but AM offers a level of freedom. These part designs use things like topology optimization, generative design and lattice structures to design parts where AM’s clear advantages can be realised. Parts designed in this way often take advantage of cutting edge software and mathematical algorithms to generate organic shapes which deliver performance and offer advantages in terms of weight and speed to manufacture.

Replicating a part via AM is sometimes a useful exercise, but often it is very misleading. If you were running the experiment to see if there were any cost or time advantages to using AM you rigged the game by not redesigning the part to fit the new process. Re-engineering a part is the first step to incorporating AM into your product development flow. Re-engineering parts for AM could deliver new possibilities and potential benefits existing processes cannot. Re-imagining product design to create parts and products built for AM by AM opens up a whole world of new business models and possibilities. Designers knowledge and experience will grow with the software and other tools needed to deliver truly innovative additive manufacturing enabled design possibilities. As this happened DfAM will become more widespread and many use cases we cannot even imagine today will become the norm. 3D printing is incredibly exciting.

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