Design for Manufacturing: geometric manufacturability evaluation for 5-axis milling

The geometric manufacturability of a part design is an important decision factor for various manufacturing applications and is especially critical for the machining process. In machining, the geometric manufacturability is primarily determined by the geometric accessibility, which has a direct impact on decisions such as setup planning, tool selection, tool orientation selection/adjustment, and the tool path strategies. These planning decisions can have significant impact on cycle time and cost. Thus, it can be justified that geometric manufacturability is one of the essential product design aspects that must be evaluated for machining processes. Being able to evaluate the geometric manufacturability will not only provide a part design metric but also offer a new approach for manufacturing process planning and optimization. This research proposes a new method for determining the geometric manufacturability of a part designed for 5-axis milling. In this work, the part design is input as polygon mesh boundary represented models, the 3D tool geometry is sampled to line segments, the 3D geometric accessibility of the part design is calculated, and a new metric for 5-axis milling manufacturability evaluation is developed. Case studies on complex mechanical component design examples are conducted to validate the method.

Systematic manufacturability evaluation using dimensionless metrics and singular value decomposition: a case study for additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing has been presented as a novel and competitive method to achieve unprecedented part shapes and material complexities. Though this holds true in niche markets, the economic viability of additive manufacturing for large-scale industrial production is still in question. Companies often struggle to justify their investment in additive manufacturing due to challenges in the integration of such technologies into mainstream production. First, most additive technologies exhibit a relatively low production rate when compared with traditional production processes. Second, there is a lack of robust design for additive manufacturing methods and tools that enable the leveraging of the attendant unique capabilities, including the ability to form organic part geometries and automated part consolidations. Third, there is a dearth of systematic part screening methods to evaluate manufacturability in additive manufacturing. To tackle the challenge of manufacturability evaluation, the present work proposes a novel approach derived from latent semantic analysis and dimensional analysis to evaluate parts and their production for a variety of selected metrics. The selected metrics serve as descriptors of design features and manufacturing functions, which are developed using functional modeling and dimensional analysis theory. Singular-value decomposition and Euclidean distance measurement techniques are used to determine the relative manufacturability for a set of parts for a specified manufacturing process technology. The utility of the method is demonstrated for laser powder bed fusion technology. While demonstrated for additive manufacturing here, the developed approach can be expanded for any given set of manufacturing processes. Expansion of this systemic manufacturability analysis method can support part design decision-making, process selection, and design and manufacturing optimization.