Application and Evaluation of Current Guidelines for Metal Additive Manufacturing

Abstract: The goal of this thesis has been to evaluate the design guidelines that currently exist regarding designing for metal additive manufacturing (AM). More specifically, this project has focused on the design guidelines regarding thin-walled features and how well they work when applied to adapt an industrial part for manufacturing with the AM process laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF). Making the walls of features as thin as possible is a very important aspect of making designs that are cost-effective to produce with AM, as it reduces manufacturing time, and the manufacturing time is one of the biggest factors contributing to the total manufacturing cost. Metal AM is comparatively expensive, and hard to apply for mass production in a financially sound way. Therefore, it is important that designs for AM take full advantage of the benefits of the technology and for that, well-developed design guidelines are needed. In this project, an industrial part from Alfa Laval that had previously been partially adapted for AM was redesigned by following the current guidelines as closely as possible. The goal was to see how well the guidelines work when applied in a realistic scenario and where further research can be done to improve them. Guidelines were collected from various research experiments within the AMLIGHT project (Design and Material Performance for Lightweight in Powder Bed Metal Additive Manufacturing) and literature about AM, as well as from Alfa Lavals recommendations for the part. L-PBF was also researched to understand the process the part was being adapted for. The redesign of the part uses much less material and would thus be much cheaper to manufacture, and some insights into where the design guidelines might be further refined were had.