Title: Design for AM – the key to the industrialization of additive manufacturing

Biography:

Professor Olaf Diegel is an educator and a practitioner of additive manufacturing and product development with an excellent track record of developing innovative solutions to engineering problems. In his role as professor of additive manufacturing, in the faculty of engineering at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, he is heavily involved in all aspects of additive manufacturing (AM). He is also one of the principal authors of the annual Wohlers Report, considered by many to be the bible of AM. His current main area of research expertise is in design for AM. In his consulting practice he develops a wide range of products for companies around the world. Over the past three decades he has developed over 100 commercialized new products including innovative new theatre lighting products, security and marine products and several home health monitoring products and, for this work, has received numerous product development awards.

Abstract

Many industries approach additive manufacturing (AM) as a drop-in replacement for conventional manufacturing technologies. This approach, however, does not fully utilize the unique possibilities that additive processes offer. For over thirty years, AM has been extensively used as a rapid prototyping technology. When using the technologies for manufacturing, however, it should be noted that AM does not remove all manufacturing restrictions. It, instead, replaces them with a different set of design considerations that designers must take into account if they wish to successfully use the technologies to add value to their products. Otherwise AM can easily become a slow and uneconomical way of manufacturing products or parts.

It is also of great importance to understand that, despite much of the marketing hype over the past few decades, AM is not an “easy” technology that can make absolutely anything. It requires a good understanding of the different technologies and how to design for them. In fact, printing parts in metal, for example, can be downright hard, and the use of AM to manufacture metal parts should only be considered if the process truly adds value to the product.

This talk attempts to impart some practical guidance on the thought process required to design parts that gain the maximum benefit from what AM can offer.