What are 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 customized. 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 standardization efforts in the ASTM and ISO organizations are also included.