Additive Manufacturing with Bioinspired Sustainable Product Design: A Conceptual Model

Abstract

The development of additive manufacturing (AM) has led to enormous opportunities for product design and manufacturing. The industrial application of AM, however, remains limited to aerospace, medical, and research arenas. These limitations are largely due to AM’s weaknesses in process speed, surface finish, and the cost of raw materials and equipment, which prevent traditional industry away from adopting AM in their productions. The potential benefit (e.g., material reduction and higher product quality) from AM is often overlooked traditional manufacturing industry. Bioinspired product design creates innovations in product redesign for less material consumption, better functionality, and less environmental impact. The objective of this paper is to develop a conceptual model for manufacturers to redesign product and identify additive manufacturing process adoption opportunities, and implement AM processes in production. This conceptual model integrates concurrent considerations of multiple additive manufacturing design and bioinspired design factors including raw material quality (e.g. size, shape, internal porosity), processing parameters (e.g., laser power, roller speed), and functionality of the product (e.g., stress, strain, displacement). A case study is conducted on making a unit Titanium product with selective laser sintering process. Three structures were examined: diamond structure, honey comb structure, and bone structure. This study reveals that the method can be applied in additive manufacturing early product design and it assists researchers and engineers explore new bioinspired geometries that could be used in manufacturing.