Evaluating the design for additive manufacturing: A process planning perspective

The emergence of Additive Manufacturing (AM) has greatly liberated the designers' hands, since the usual design constraints in machining or other traditional processing technologies partially or even totally disappeared in AM and it seems that AM can form any desired very complex geometries through a layer by layer construction manner. However, AM processes still have their own processing characteristics and limits. To help designers to benefit more from the unique characteristics of AM and avoid the processing limits or low down the later processing difficulty after design, this paper proposes a two-level evaluation framework to assess the design from a process planning perspective. The proposed evaluation framework is associated with a two-level process planning framework for AM, and within each level, several indicators for assessment are defined and used to convey the information from process planning for improving the design.