Combining material efficiency and part reliability by product optimization applying additive manufacturing

Nowadays, the material efficiency and part reliability are two majorissues in product development. Thus a product optimization often requires complex structures that are hard to be manufactured conventionally. Additive Manufacturing (AM) however offers great potentials for producing complex shaped parts economically. Different approaches are feasible to exploit these potentials based on the part’s application from shape optimization of structural components to the integration of functions and other entities of assemblies. Several parameters are defined that influence the costs and quality of the future product and carefully have to be balanced. To do so, the use of already known tools for the optimization and design needs to be reconsidered and adapted to the special characteristics of AM. As not all optimization potentials can be realized perfectly, a decision methodology is required to obtain the relevant potentials and to get to a trade-off between all requirements including the ecological impact. The paper shows different approaches for product optimization with AM and procedures for decision making in order to get to the optimal solution.