Manufacturability Assessment and Design for AM

Abstract

The current exponential increasement of the market size and the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies has only been met with a linear increment of additively manufactured components and final products. The causality of this inconsistency is traced to the lack of expertise knowledge, methodologies for technological assessment and design for AM that render the AM processes’ competitiveness unattractive for the industrial sectors. The need to determine the added value of an AM technology for implementation to the manufacturing phases of an entity is of the essence. This work proposes an assessment method to screen the added value that an AM technology can offer to an entity by quantifying the AM utilization throughout the different product development and production stages. To quantify the AM technology assessment in terms of: final part manufacturing, flexibility to the production line, input to the engineering and design stages, cost reduction and increased performance of the final part; two already existing metrics were used (TRL and MRL), three were introduced (UPD, UFP and PPP) and the unified AM Manufacturability Assessment (AMMA) equation was created to combine the previous. The proposed method is to improve the AM industrial uptake and steer the community towards an enhanced Design for AM mentality.