Early design stage selection of best manufacturing process

Design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) calls for more complex designs to best utilise unique design freedoms to improve designs. Conversely, less complex designs are generally more suitable for conventional manufacturing processes due to the higher cost to produce features that are more complex. As additive manufacturing (AM) emerges as an increasingly viable option to produce products beyond initial prototyping, the choice of conventional versus additive manufacturing must occur as early as possible in the design process as this choice can substantially affect how the product is designed. Realising the right decision too late in a design process will lead to wasted design time, increased time to market the product, a functionally inferior design, and/or a costlier product. To address this critical decision, we introduce a Design for any X Manufacturing (DFXM) method to use at early design stages to identify the best process for a given product design in cases where comprehensive current process databases may not yet be available to a designer to screen process choices. This DFXM method customises targeted questions to break down concepts into the key elements while capturing any known disparate process choices within consistent formulations. The method relates any measurable metrics found for any criteria at conceptual design within these formulations to evaluate them accordingly. A technique is introduced to simplify and focus voluminous process capability information toward that needed for this specialised early stage decision. After initial inputs from a designer, an algorithm automatically computes the best process choice as a function of expected order quantity. Three illustrative case studies demonstrate the practical application of this DFXM method in representative design scenarios.