Design for additive manufacturing
Features
The higher the position that you move to on the AM adoption staircase, the more use you make of the unique capabilities and design freedom that AM provides. The higher steps demand higher commitment in terms of design and process validation, but also deliver higher product cost and lifetime benefits.
Light-weight, efficient product design is one of the key drivers behind the increasing adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) for series production.
Additive manufacturing (AM) gives us tremendous freedom to create components with free-form and intricate features, designs which would be impractical - if not impossible - to produce conventionally.
This post is based on work that was presented at AMUG 2016 by my colleague Kevin Brigden. For more details, view his slide share: Adaptation for AM (AfAM) versus Design for AM (DfAM).
AM offers great design freedom to produce efficient, high-performance parts. But accommodating AM process characteristics is essential to building production parts with minimum cost and waste. Find out how you can optimise your designs with metal AM.