Design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) methodologies: a proposal to foster the design of microwave waveguide components

Additive manufacturing offers many advantages, especially in terms of creativity and design freedom. However, this emerging technology is disrupting the way design is carried out and creativity is often limited by the cognitive barriers installed through years of traditional manufacturing processes. Likewise, as this manufacturing process is relatively recent and quite unknown to designers, its specificities are not always considered during the design phase, which leads to manufactured parts happening to differ from CAD models in terms of sizing or surface quality. Consequently, microwave components nowadays manufactured layer-by-layer do not exhibit operational electromagnetic performances. In this way, it is necessary to guide designers throughout the development of a product by drawing their attention to the different steps they must consider in order to design an additive manufactured optimised part.