Ultrasonic Consolidation is a combination of additive and subtractive manufacturing processes resulting in considerable material waste. This waste is a function of the geometry of the part being manufactured and of the relative placement of the layer with respect to the metal bands. Thus the waste may be minimized by careful choice of the layer angle and offset from the original position.; Previous work done in this field had developed an automated algorithm which optimally places and orients the individual slices of the STL file of the artifact being manufactured. However, the problem was solved on a 2-D scale and the 3-D nature of the part was not considered for the development of the algorithm. The earlier algorithm employed approximation on the input data to minimize the computational expense. This resulted in convergence of the optimizer to suboptimal solutions. Further, as the final part is made of anisotropic material the relative angles and overlap between subsequent layers also plays an important role in the final part strength. Finally, it is noted that the build time required for the ultrasonic consolidation process is a function of the number of bands required to form each slice.; Considering these limitations and opportunities, this thesis presents an algorithm which optimally orients and places the part layers with respect to aluminum bands in order to minimize the waste formed and the build time required. The algorithm has the capability of increasing the part strength by forming crisscross and brick structures using the metal foils. This research work also improves on the previous algorithm by extending the functionality of the algorithm by building in capability to handle multiple loops within the same slice and non convex slice data. Further, the research studies the choice of optimizer that needs to be employed for different types of input data.
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