ABSTRACT

Today, the competitiveness of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies for the production of small to medium volumes of plastic components is well established (Atzeni et al. 2010). The effectiveness benefits from the exploiting ofAM capabilities: parts should be redesigned for AM and not simply transitioned maintaining the design for conventional processes (Rochus et al. 2007, Gibson et al. 2010). As a matter of fact, the absence of geometric constraints allows focusing design efforts on part functionality and assembly, since manufacturing of complex aesthetic shapes is no longer a problem. Assembling issues and costs can be reduced by rationalizing part count and fabricating devices in their assembled state (Gibson et al. 2010). In addition, other traditional manufacturing constraints may be disregarded, such as sizes of prefabricated materials, coordinate systems and symmetric axis for machining. At least, design can be optimized towards highest strength and lowest weight, possibly using CAE software packages (Rezaie et al. 2013, Vaughan & Crawford 2013), saving money on material quantities.