Development of an Information Model for the Pre-process of Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has a variety of benefits that make it an exciting alternative to conventional manufacturing processes. For example, it is possible to manufacture customized, small volume parts with complex geometry in a short time to market. This ensures a steadily growing spread of additive manufacturing beyond its use in prototyping. However, it is difficult for additive manufacturing to compete with conventional manufacturing processes in terms of cost with growing batch sizes.The additive manufacturing process has to be optimized to improve economic efficiency while maintaining or increasing part quality. One approach is focusing on the pre-process. The AM pre-process comprises the determination of part orientation, the setting of manufacturing parameters, and the toolpath generation. Since all decisions made during this process step affect the subsequent manufacturing process, there is a lot of optimization potential.This paper develops an information model of the AM pre-process to map all information and its complex interdependencies. Therefore, a process model is developed and used to determine all input and output information describing the process steps and their relation to other process steps. It is tested for validation by performing the AM pre-process steps with a demonstrator part, ensuring all relevant information can be represented in the information model.