Volumetric Data Analysis: Inspection and Experimental Design for Additive Manufacturing

摘要

3D printing (3DP), also known as additive manufacturing (AM), is a transformative manufacturing technology that can directly create 3-dimensional physical parts from CAD design. [1] Traditional manufacturing processes, such as machining processes, often require a careful analysis of the CAD model and a detailed process planning strategy to produce a product. Even though these classical manufacturing processes are widely adopted by manufacturing industries for mass production, the process planning step can be involved and time consuming based on the geometric complexity of the products. This time can be ignored for mass production. However, it can be quite significant when considering highly customized or geometrically complex products for small-to-medium batch of products. Sometimes, the initial design must be decomposed to subassembly due to the inner structure or complex shape; while, the products cannot even be produced due to the complexity of the features and limitation of process capability. 3DP can heavily reduce such huge amount of efforts and provide feasibility and flexibility to produce complex structural products. The nature of how AM works is that the final products are crated through adding material layer by layer. In this way, the 3-dimensional production is reduced to generate a pile of lower-dimensional, 2-d, thin plates. The complex outer surfaces are reduced to the stack-up of thin plates with different shapes, while the inner structures are reduced to the hollow features within the plate. In this way, AM outperforms traditional manufacturing in terms of analytical difficulty, design complexity, internal structural design, and, further, throughput time for small batch production.