Design for additive manufacturing in customized products

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a promising manufacturing technology and increasingly used to develop parts, tools, and products beyond Rapid Prototypes (RP). The unique capabilities of AM technologies enable new opportunities for customization, through significant improvements in product performance, multi-functionality, and lower overall manufacturing costs. The objective of this research is to propose a formal representation of design knowledge for Customized Design for Additive Manufacturing (CDFAM). In this study, the design knowledge on operational properties of Electron Beam Melting (EBM) are formally represented using Finite State Automata (FSA) and the concept of affordance to identify the interrelations between AM constraints, user's desire and capabilities, and product's customized features. The CDFAM method is expected to be the basic of advanced computational models for maximizing design and AM performances in product and AM process design.