Design rules with modularity for additive manufacturing

Abstract

Design rules for additive manufacturing (AM) can help ensure manufacturability, which can be viewed as compatibility between designs and the fabrication processes that produce those designs. Additionally, such rules frequently provide direct guidelines or constraints for designing AM-destined parts. Here, we present design rules as sets of modular components and associated formalisms. Independent of context, these representations can be more easily interpreted and efficiently implemented. Given context, components are specialized to represent process-specific parameters for different AM builds and processes. This method of specialization enables designers to reconfigure design rules, rather than create new rules from scratch, thus preserving fundamental AM principles while supporting customization and explicit representation. © SFF 2015.All rights reserved.