Designing for production parts

By on November 13th, 2017 in Ideas

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 David Tucker, VP HP Vertical Market Development 3d printing 
David Tucker, VP HP Vertical Market Development 3d printing 

How do we get to tomorrow, to use 3D Printing for true Manufacturing applications through to production?

There are ways to optimize a design for Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) technology. 

  • Printed layer optimization can be done by eliminating unnecessary material and therefore reducing the cost per part.
  • Packing density optimization 

Integrating the Kanban method and DfAM (Design for AM) optimizations with the use of Auto-packing software resulting in more dense parts. 

 Kanban Method
Kanban Method
  • More layers of parts = cost per part is less
  • Utilization of capital
  • Increases productivity 
  • Decreased cost

Design recommendations:

  1. Identify the build direction
  2. Avoid sudden changes in Printed surface area
  3. Think about packing density. More parts together = less cost

Designing parts (during the design phase) for packing density in order to push manufacturing optimization resulting in reduced costs. This is a different way of thinking about designing parts. Also abstraction / foldable designs. The design can be advanced through communication with SAP (collaboration room) and Siemens – auto-packing software.

Read more about efficiency of 3D Printing

By Marney Stapley

Marney is Fabbaloo's busy business manager, who normally works on marketing and sales - but occasionally writes a story for the blog itself.