Integration of collaborative design and process planning for artificial bone scaffold 3D printer nozzle

The requirement for high-quality product with reduced cost and time-to-market in multidisciplinary project is demanding. Integration of design and process planning with computer aided techniques can provide a solution to this challenge. This paper describes a reference model of integrating computer aided techniques to aid the concurrent development of a multi-nozzle 3D printer for fabricating artificial bone scaffold at, the University of Strathclyde and the Northwestern Polytechnical University. This integration reference model, including design tools such as Material Computation (MC), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CID), and CAD, and planning tool such as CAM techniques, is employed to support this special 3D printer development. The high precision multi-nozzle development was used as a case study to validate this integration of concurrent design and process planning. CAD tools were used to provide several nozzle design concepts and a rigorous CFD analysis of several nozzle designs under the same boundary conditions were undertaken to refine and evaluate them by research staff from both institutions. This cooperative conceptual design case study demonstrated that it drastically reduced development time and cost in devising nozzle conceptual sketch design and optimizing the nozzle design for 3D printer. This makes it an important step in designing a high precision artificial bone rapid manufacturing machine.