Session: 06-04-01 Design for Additive Manufacturing I

Paper Number: 69602

Start Time: Friday, 11:35 AM

69602 - Methods for the Design of Individual Mechanisms for the Fabrication by Additive Manufacturing for the Design of Individual Mechanisms for the Fabrication by Additive Manufacuring 

The technology of Additive Manufacturing enables new possibilities and big changes for products and design processes. The freedom of shape and the opportunity of individualization of parts without additional fabrication steps or cost for tools allow new approaches in science and business models in economy. Thereby the time consumptive step in the realization of individualized products is not the fabrication phase anymore, but in the design phase. The key to solve this issue lies in the development of algorithms for automated process-specific design.

Most engineers use traditional computer aided design programs, where parts are defined through their geometry. But this tools were made for traditional fabrication techniques, where shape complexity and manufacturability of a part was a big issue. Although this restriction seems to be overcome, still similar design solutions are delivered in industy (now for small batches) not taking the real advantages of Additive Manufacturing into effect in terms of creating internal structures or integrating functions in parts.

At our institute a MATLAB integrated design toolbox is developed trying to overcome this problem. The basic idea is an algorithmic approach for design towards functional oriented direct generation of surface models, that can be used in an 3D printing process without converting steps. The toolbox can for example be used to automatically generate task specific surgical instruments from medical data. In the current state the toolbox is adapted to the selective laser sintering process and only accessible within the MATLAB computation environment.  

In this paper a concept is presented that adapts the toolbox to a novel droplet based Additive Manufacturing process enabling rigid/soft multi material printing and thereby powerful solutions to create compliant mechanisms. A small set of functions needed for the design of mechanisms is included in this work. The scope provides algorithms to design flexure hinges, mechanical connectors and compliant grippers and the procedure of automated design of this components is presented. To enlarge the possibilities of the work the software is integrated to the current workflow of CAD integrated design.

Dassault Systems CATIA is used as design environment for this and functions are realized allowing a data exchange between automated design library and commercial CAD environment to realize the rapid design of individual mechanisms to execute movement tasks in robotic applications.

Several application examples are shown, realized with the software. Experiments are presented showing investigation of how well functional based automated design algorithms are fitted to design compliant mechanisms.

Presenting Author: Andreas Schroeffer Institute For Mictrotechnilogy and Medical Device Technology

Authors:

Andreas Schroeffer Technical University of Munich
Franz Irlinger Technical University ofMunich
Tim Lueth Technical University of Munich