Research supporting principles for DFAM

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies enable the fabrication of parts and devices that are geometrically complex, have graded material compositions, and can be customised.

To take advantage of these capabilities, it is important to guide engineering designers through the various issues that are unique to AM. We explore the range of principles that are relevant to Design For Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) in this paper.

These include ideas about generating designs that cannot be fabricated using conventional methods to understanding the realities of existing machines and materials to micro-scale issues related to material microstructures and resulting process variations.

Comments about standardisation efforts in the ASTM and ISO organisations are also included.

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Additive Manufacturing of Cellular Structures

Additive Manufacturing technologies enable the fabrication of parts and devices that are geometrically complex, have graded material compositions, and can be customized.

To take advantage of these capabilities, it is important to assist designers in exploring unexplored regions of design spaces. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges in design for additive manufacturing.

A new computer-aided Design For Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) method is presented that is based on the process-structure-property-behavior model common in the materials design community.

Examples of cellular materials design and manufacturing are used to illustrate the DFAM method.

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