CAREER: Consideration of Manufacturability in Early Stage Design for Additive Manufacturing

该学院早期职业发展计划（Career）资助将通过研究如何将增材制造（AM）工艺的设计机会和制造限制整合到工程设计实践的早期阶段，为促进国家繁荣和经济福利做出贡献。到2025年底，全球增材制造市场预计将超过400亿美元，并已被确定为美国未来全球制造业竞争力的重要方面。虽然增材制造带来的几何复杂性的增加为设计创新提供了新的机会，但设计师对可制造性的传统假设可能会无意中限制他们充分利用这些机会。与此同时，设计工程师将不得不考虑增材制造技术赋予设计的新限制，以避免潜在的构建失败。这个CAREER项目将有助于了解如何最好地平衡这些权衡，以便能够更快地为增材制造提供可行的、创造性的和可制造的设计，并减少后期设计阶段的产品修改。配套的教育计划将满足对创新型、技术型劳动力的需求，这些劳动力能够打破设计和制造领域之间的传统壁垒。这将通过部署三个新颖的教育平台来实现，这些平台旨在让不同学术水平的学生参与到AM核心设计概念的实践学习中。本CAREER研究的目标是获得对工程师早期设计如何反映传统制造限制的基本理解，并了解如何通过机会主义和限制性指导的系统集成来取代工程师设计实践中存在的此类限制。具体的研究任务将解决(1)了解传统可制造特征在早期设计中的普遍程度，以及这些特征与DfAM的兼容性；(2)了解DfAM指南应如何以及何时传达给早期设计的工程师，以成功取代传统可制造特征的使用。(3)了解DfAM指南在早期设计中的系统集成如何影响原始设计和重新设计案例的迭代和产品质量。这些目标将通过与工程学生和实践工程师的设计研究来解决。结果将是一个强大的、经过验证的方法，将增材制造设计概念纳入早期设计实践，使设计师能够快速融合到可制造的设计中。这项研究有望揭示DfAM看似矛盾的机会性和限制性方面之间至关重要的相互作用，否则在单独研究它们时可能会隐藏它们。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by studying how the design opportunities and manufacturing restrictions of additive manufacturing (AM) processes should be integrated in the early stages of engineering design practice. The global AM market is expected to reach over $40 billion by the end of 2025 and has been identified as an important facet of the United States’ future global manufacturing competitiveness. While the increase in geometric complexity afforded by AM opens new opportunities for design innovations, designers' traditional assumptions of manufacturability may unintentionally limit them from taking full advantage of these opportunities. At the same time, design engineers will have to consider new restrictions that AM technology imparts on designs to avoid potential build failure. This CAREER project will help to understand how best to balance these tradeoffs so as to be able to more quickly arrive at viable, creative, and manufacturable designs for AM and to reduce product revision in later design stages. The accompanying educational plan will address the need for an innovative, technically grounded workforce capable of breaking down traditional barriers between the realms of design and manufacturing. This will be achieved through the deployment of three novel educational platforms meant to engage students from across academic levels in hands-on learning with core design concepts for AM.The objectives of this CAREER research is to gain a fundamental understanding of how engineers' early-stage designs reflect traditional manufacturing limitations and to understand how the presence of such limitations in an engineer's design practice can be supplanted through systematic integration of both opportunistic and restrictive guidelines. Specific research tasks will address (1) understanding how prevalent traditionally manufacturable features are in early-stage designs and how compatible these features are with DfAM, (2) understanding how and when DfAM guidelines should be conveyed to engineers in early-stage design to successfully supplant the use of traditionally manufacturable features, and (3) understanding how systematic integration of DfAM guidelines in early-stage design affects iteration and product quality for both original design and redesign cases. These objectives will be addressed through design studies with both engineering students and practicing engineers. The result will be a robust, validated approach to incorporate AM design concepts in early-stage design practice so designers can quickly converge to manufacturable designs. This research is expected to reveal crucial interaction effects between the seemingly contradictory opportunistic and restrictive sides of DfAM, which might otherwise remain hidden when studying each in isolation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.