Abstract
This work explores an additive-manufacturing-enabled combination-of-function approach for design of modular products. AM technologies allow the design and manufacturing of nearly free-form geometry, which can be used to create more complex, multi-function or multi-feature parts. The approach presented here replaces sub-assemblies within a modular product or system with more complex consolidated parts that are designed and manufactured using AM technologies. This approach can increase the reliability of systems and products by reducing the number of interfaces, as well as allowing the optimization of the more complex parts during the design. The smaller part count and the ability of users to replace or upgrade the system or product parts on-demand should reduce user risk, life-cycle costs, and prevent obsolescence for the user of many systems. This study presents a detailed review on the current state-of-the-art in modular product design in order to demonstrate the place, need and usefulness of this AM-enabled method for systems and products that could benefit from it. A detailed case study is developed and presented to illustrate the concepts.
Highlights
As additive manufacturing (AM) technology becomes more widely used and accepted within the engineering and production world, the many benefits it offers are becoming increasingly useful in engineering design
The main focus of this study is to explore the idea of modular product design based on the use of large, complex, multi-function parts that can replace some sub-assemblies in modular design
After re-design, the new system should be evaluated to ensure that the new design is at least equivalent to the old design; in theory, it should be superior to the old design but this must to be established in order to justify using AM-Enabled Modular Design (AMEMD)
Summary
As additive manufacturing (AM) technology becomes more widely used and accepted within the engineering and production world, the many benefits it offers are becoming increasingly useful in engineering design. AM builds parts in layers directly from computer-aided design (CAD) data with few geometric restrictions, allowing the use and manufacturing of parts with very complex features. This design freedom is very useful in the production of optimized parts which could replace existing single parts or even several whole parts which interact with each other. The design goal is to either consolidate several parts into one or to decompose and recombine parts into new ones [4,5,6,7,8] These new parts are functionally superior to the original ones; just having more control over the part geometry during processing may provide many benefits on its own by simplifying the manufacturing process [9,10,11]
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