IAA - Manufacturing Process-Aware Design Optimisation

Additive manufacturing is limited in its ability to accurately reproduce high aspect ratio features such as thin walls and fine needles. The challenge in identifying these features is that they exist at all scales and all orientations, making them difficult to remove or redesign. The thermal history of the component as it is manufactured layer-by-Iayer is critical. The machine’s laser scans across the powder, consolidating it into the final geometry. Thermal gradients across the part can lead to internal stresses and distortion, poor material properties or even total build failure due to cracking. There are no existing solutions that facilitate the design of optimised parts that are strictly ’manufacturable’ from the point of view of AM. In particular, solutions that include filters to remove overhangs, high-aspect ratio features and features that will lead to thermal history issues during the build do not currently exist.

The cost of powdered material, high machine costs, the commitment of engineering time and the processing speed of AM have huge cost implications and the cost of manufacturing failures is exorbitant. Therefore, to support the designers and manufacturers of the future, it is necessary to increase confidence in the ’manufacturability’ of a component ahead of time.

The aim of this research is to develop an aspect ratio filter and a thermal history filter for use within the existing DHarMa software. This extension of the existing DHarMa capability will position the work as being more advanced than any other research or industrial software capabilities that are in the public domain.