Product optimization with and for Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing offers a great potential for the optimization of products. Therefore different approaches are feasible to exploit these potentials for elaborating optimal solutions. For example these include optimization of weight or stiffness of structural components as well as the integration of functions and other entities of assemblies. Note, however, that additive manufacturing processes have process specific limitations. Products, components and assemblies, as well as procedures for the design and production preparation must be optimized with regard to a successful additive manufacturing. The use of already known tools for the optimization and design needs to be reconsidered and adapted to theadditive manufacturing. This also includes the production planning with component orientation in build chamber as well as a necessary quality management system. This paper shows several ways for product optimization with additive manufacturing, often based on topology optimization, and procedures for information gathering, decision making and shape determination for part optimization for Additive Manufacturing.