Additive Design Process for Critical Structures: Attempt study

Abstract: There is a gap in scientific knowledge regarding designing functional parts that may not fail, and this project came to define these parts as critical structures. The proposed design process is called the Additive Design Process for Critical Structure, which synthesizes required activities found in the literature review necessary to produce theoretically safe design structures. Although this proposed design process does not meet the requirements of a safe design as intended and must be further studied before the proposed design process can be adapted. The project’s ambition was to integrate the design’s safety with value components, referred to as elements/activities/tools/processes that could contribute to innovation and value creation, to exploit the advantages of additive manufacturing in the design process. The research conducted in this project adapted and applied Design Research Methodology (DRM), written by Blessing & Chakrabarti (2009). Two main research questions were studied that lay a foundation for this thesis, presented below. The project combined quantitative and qualitative research methods to generate the necessary knowledge and then apply/test the derived knowledge to answer these research questions. RQ1: What activities can this project identify to synthesize an additive design process in constructing critical structures for Additive Manufacturing (AM)? RQ2: What are the possible value components to include in the additive design process that would contribute to innovation concerning lead time, weight, and mass customization? The results show that the proposed design process, Additive Design Process for Critical Structured, did not meet the theoretical safe design. However, the findings still suggest that the required activities to achieve a safe design are by introducing defined and explicit protective measurements in the design process. The protective measurement parameters identified in this project were safety factors and Finite Element Analysis (FEA); the question of why the design process does not meet the requirements of producing a theoretical safe design is unknown today and needs further study. Concerning the second RQ, the results showed that Generative Design (GD) was this project's most innovative value component. Adapting GD contributed to shortening the product development time, liberating the design engineer to explore a bolder concept, reducing weight, and allowing the design engineers to generate mass customization. Keywords: Design for Additive Manufacturing, Design Process, Generative Design, Method, Critical Structures, Safety factor.