Exploiting Design Intent to Produce Fail‐Safe Extrusion‐Based Additive Manufacturing Parts

Abstract

AbstractAdditive manufacturing (AM) technology is an innovated production process mostly in the field of customization parts that gained the interest of many academics and industries over the last 20 years. The extrusion‐based technique and a wide variety of constantly developed polymer materials that AM technology uses, integrates multiple functions and mechanical properties to parts, and provides a flexibility in fabrication of complicated shapes, making products attractive to a wide range of applications. The quality and durability of those parts are controlled by numerous of building features that need to be set before building through specialized software that accompanies AM machines. A very crucial building feature that determines the inner structure of parts is lattice structure which is proved to determine the strength‐to‐weight ratio, the minimization of the material, the building time, and the energy absorption of the produced parts. However, lattice structures can be applied only to the entire geometry of a part because the software that accompanies AM machines have limited capabilities regarding the inner geometry of products since they cannot define different shell thickness values to the inner surfaces as well as multiple geometry lattice pattern to specific areas of the part. The current study proposes a new methodology of controlling the internal geometry and fatigue limits of extrusion‐based parts, bypassing the low capabilities of AM software using the meaning of design intent to insert lattice structures on specific areas of a part to produce AM products applicable to the field of fail‐safe in industry.