Within the context of modern industries, additive manufacturing (AM) plays a critical role. Design for AM (DfAM) requires the definition of a list of design actions that are related to the geometry of the product under development and affect aspects of the overall product design such as: (i) the type of process, (ii) the material to adopt, and (iii) the geometry and the thickness of the model. Moreover, many other activities are related to the AM process itself such as the settings of machine parameters, the levels of distortion, geometry compensations, the use of supports and so on. While the first set of actions refers to the product design and implication on subsequent manufacturing process, the second set of actions refers to the AM engineering which is characterized by different tasks that usually requires numerical simulations.The way to collect manufacturing information brings with it the necessity to integrate the heterogenic nature of the information that comes from different sources, which could lead a divergent way of interpreting its meaning, causing misinformation, misleads and errors that increase project costs and development time. This practice is known as knowledge-based engineering (KBE) and it is able to capture engineering knowledge systematically into the design system, with the aim to support the engineering activities by the re-use of previous experience. Despite the use of KBE looks promising in the integration of DfAM principles in the early phases of product development, DfAM suffers from a real interoperability with 3D CAD systems and DfAM principles are currently being applied downstream of the 3D modeling, by following useful guidelines available from the literature and company’s know-how (tacit internal knowledge). The main issue in this field is related to the nature of the CAD model which is represented by a mesh (i.e., STL file) and not with a traditional boundary representation (B-rep) model.By acknowledging the current gap, the goal of this paper is to describe a method to formalize AM engineering knowledge (rule-based approach) that is used as a repository for the development of CAD-integrated decision support system (software platform) for AM-compliant products. The software platform uses, as input, geometrical data retrieved by the feature analysis of the 3D CAD model (feature recognition approach) and technical aspects related to AM operations (DfAM rules) previously collected through the knowledge-based system. In this manner, it will be possible to close the gap between the design and production departments, through the creation of a knowledge-based system. The latter can translate the tacit knowledge used during the development of AM products into explicit and reusable knowledge. The outcome of this system does not concern the possibility to predict the AM process parameters, but rather the possibility to deliver a consistent product design (geometrical feature) in relation to the AM process. It is worth noting that the design issues refer to the product geometrical data connected with the AM processes. The novel contribution of this work consists in the definition of a methodological framework that can be adopted for the development of a CAD-integrated DfAM tool.

Design for Additive Manufacturing: A Framework to Collect and Reuse Engineering Knowledge Towards a CAD-Based Tool

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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