Analysis of design guidelines for automated order acceptance in additive manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is increasingly used in industrial production. Compared to conventional manufacturing technologies, such as milling and casting, AM offers a high degree of design freedom. Nevertheless, still some manufacturing restrictions and design guidelines have to be considered to ensure a flawless production. Therefore, a checking of design guidelines is a necessary step in order acceptance. Addressing this need, this paper presents an integrated analysis of design guidelines for an automated order acceptance. In recent times, guideline catalogs for the design of additively manufactured parts have been developed. However, the analysis of a part's geometry with regard to these guidelines still requires a lot of manual work and expert knowledge. This paper introduces different algorithmic approaches, which automate the analysis and assessment of a part's geometry. Based on a preselection of guidelines from existing design catalogs for selective laser melting and sintering, this paper presents algorithms to automatically check the manufacturability of a part. The algorithms use the triangulated surface geometry (STL) of a part. They are implemented within a web-based platform for the automated order acceptance of additive manufactured parts. The evaluation compares the different algorithms regarding their efficiency and effectiveness.