Additive manufacturing adoption in product design: an overview from literature and industry

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies have greatly extended design possibilities and freedom. However, in the designer everyday work, the decision regarding the adoption of AM for some components is not straightforward. There is a need to evaluate the properties of the available materials, their compatibility with the specific application, redesign shapes accordingly to additive rather than subtractive or deforming processes, conceive merging components in unique complex multifunctional parts. Indeed, economic, procurement and logistics evaluations, possibly extended to the entire life cycle, are necessary to come to a decision for a new and radical solution. In this context, the paper investigates the complex set of information involved in the process to guide a designer in a structured assessment and evaluation of opportunities for the adoption of AM. The approach includes the analysis of the design requirements to evaluate the applicability of additive technologies. Selected design questions are presented as attention points to help designers in the decision-making process along with a metric to merge the answers in an overall compliance index. Finally, some test cases from the literature and industry are reported to validate the proposed decision process.