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

该学院早期职业发展计划（CAREER）拨款将通过研究如何将增材制造（AM）过程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AM市场预计将达到400亿美元以上，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AM提供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AM技术对设计的新限制，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AM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的、技术上有基础的劳动力的需求，这些劳动力能够打破设计和制造领域之间的传统障碍。 这将通过部署三个新颖的教育平台来实现，旨在让来自不同学术水平的学生参与实践学习，了解AM的核心设计概念。阶段设计反映了传统的制造限制，并了解如何在工程师的设计实践中存在这样的限制，可以通过取代有系统地结合机会性和限制性准则。具体的研究任务将涉及（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的兼容程度，（2）了解DfAM指南应如何以及何时传达给早期设计中的工程师，以成功取代传统可制造特征的使用，以及（3）理解在早期设计阶段系统地集成DfAM指南如何影响初始设计和重新设计情况下的迭代和产品质量。这些目标将通过与工程专业学生和实践工程师的设计研究来解决。其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，使设计师可以快速收敛到可制造的设计。这项研究有望揭示DfAM看似矛盾的机会主义和限制性方面之间的关键相互作用效应，否则在孤立地研究每一个方面时可能会隐藏这些效应。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.