Integrated Design Pattern Matrix for Additive Manufacturing – A Holistic Potential Analysis for Systemic Product and Production Engineering

Abstract

To fully address the nowadays challenges of constantly changing customer needs while having an increased competition from globalization and market saturation issues, the conceptual analysis of AM is of vital importance apart from the numerous technological advances in a more capable process and material development. In doing so, the initial determination of which vast design possibilities can most efficiently be fabricated in correlation with the right choice of material and process needs to be methodologically tackled, particularly for the user-oriented but also product-oriented fulfillment of targeted requirements already at an early, functional stage of product development. Thus, this contribution presents an extended approach that derives material and manufacturing-specific properties from potentially suggested principle solutions, and finally assigns these extensive design proposals of one function carrier to feasible material and manufacturing combinations as assessed solution variants. However, since a product system is mostly composed of several functions, additionally a systemic extension also takes into account the issue of integral construction methods, i.e. the smart combination of several functions to one component by means of balancing their cross-component material and manufacturing-specific properties.