Design guidelines for the separation of components to combine the potentials of additive and conventional manufacturing processes

Abstract

Additive manufacturing offers great potential in the geometric design of components. However, there are also restrictions that must be taken into account. These have already been studied and described in the literature. In order to improve the design of components for additive manufacturing, the restrictions are documented in the form of design guidelines and made available to the designer. The design guidelines show a geometry that is less suitable for additive manufacturing and what adjustments must be made to this geometry to enable or improve manufacturing. However, such an adaptation of the geometry is not always possible. This paper therefore extends existing design guidelines in order to specifically aim for the combined manufacturing of the components with different manufacturing processes and to use this as a means to comply with the restrictions of additive manufacturing. In this way, the potential of additive manufacturing is combined with the potential of conventional manufacturing processes in order to overcome the restrictions of additive manufacturing. To put this into practice, new design guidelines are presented that specifically identify features that can be better manufactured conventionally. Finally, these new design guidelines are evaluated on the basis of an example component being manufactured by machining and laser powder bed fusion, resulting in a reduction of manufacturing costs by 27%.