Digital Additive Manufacture: Improved Product and Equipment Design for 3D Printing

This thesis offers an understanding of the field of digital additive manufacture and introduces the role of design in advancing the technology and application of this novel commercial production capability. The field is distinguished from other additive techniques with the addition of “digital” to the additive manufacturing term. Methods of increasing process competitiveness for commercial applications are described with the use of low-cost open source equipment through two sets of case studies conducted by the author (design for extrusion-based digital additive manufacture and equipment design / operation). As a result, the author identified and improved eight areas of development: layer design; support design; profile design; mesostructure design; extrusion tooling; solidification control; printing surface and positioning system. These areas of development inform professional and hobbyist design for manufacture and future interdisciplinary research.Keywords:Advanced manufacturing; Competitive advantage; Product design; Iterative design; Additive manufacturing; Fused Deposition Modeling; Computer Numerical Control