Categorization of Design for Additive Manufacturing Concepts

Design for AM (DfAM) has become a widely followed research field with practitioners outside of the research community looking for instructions and inspiration on how to leverage the unique capabilities of AM in their products. The research community has responded by producing an abundance of valuable DfAM literature. However, although each individual research article is useful and can answer specific questions, the connection between them can be difficult to fathom due to the lack of a structured overview of DfAM.

This paper proposes a categorization framework to organize the many concepts of DfAM in a structured manner. The framework for the categorization used in this paper is based on a widely used generic product design workflow of Pahl and Beitz that is augmented with concepts from AM literature. The framework is a tool for researchers to position their work in relation to other literature, and it can also be used as a support to achieve novel product designs with AM.

To demonstrate how the framework can be used for guided design, the paper presents every stage of the design process in the context of designing a proof-of-concept heat exchanger that leverages the technical benefits of AM.