A Design Framework for Additive Manufacturing: Integration of Additive Manufacturing Capabilities in the Early Design Process

Additive manufacturing has emerged as an integral part of modern manufacturing because of its unique capabilities in various application domains. As efforts to effectively apply additive manufacturing, design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) has risen to provide a set of guidelines based on a practical design framework or a methodology during the product design process of additive manufacturing. However, most existing DfAM methods do not effectively consider the capabilities of extant additive manufacturing technologies in the early design stages, and therefore it is hard to map functional requirements from customer needs onto a product design for additive manufacturing. Moreover, available DfAM methods tend to rely on the direct application of a specific decision method rather than a systematic approach with appropriate deployment and transformation of available design decision methods considering the additive manufacturing environment. Consequently, existing DfAM methods lack suitability for use by additive manufacturing novices. To tackle these issues, this study develops a design framework for additive manufacturing through the integration of axiomatic design and theory of inventive problem-solving (TRIZ). This integrated approach is effective because the axiomatic design approach can be used to systematically define and analyze a design problem, while the TRIZ problem-solving approach combined with an additive manufacturing database can be used as an idea generation tool to generate innovative solutions for the design problem. A case study for a housing cover redesign is presented to apply and validate the proposed design framework.