A Design for Additive Manufacturing Framework: Product Function Integration and Structure Simplification
Auwal Haruna, Pingyu Jiang
Abstract
Manufacturing industries have been practicing additive manufacturing (AM) processes which can generate complex shapes with high degree of accuracy, close dimensional tolerance, and better surface finish. These processes involve the use of technology to improve product design by reducing the number of parts and assemblies with the relevant technology to which design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) emerges. However, the liberation of design which DFAM provided such as function integration and structure simplification have not been deeply investigated. Therefore, to envisage the revamping of these design potentials provided by DFAM to improve precision of part design, arises with the questions of: how to develop a new part design model for fuse deposition modelling (FDM) process, and how to develop a design process model to integrate traditional design (TD) with DFAM. Subsequently, we proposed a four-layered design framework to solve the aforementioned-problems with a case study that shows the effectiveness of our approach.