Industrial Case Studies of Design for Plastic Additive Manufacturing for End-Use Consumer Products Wei Liu, 1 Zicheng Zhu, 2 and Songhe Ye 3 Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) is gaining increasing interests in modern industries, with its unparalleled capability for direct manufacture of high-value geometrically complex products. With continued technology advancements, plastic AM enables consumer goods to be economically produced in a low to medium pro- duction scale. Due to unique AM process characteristics, current design methods that are established based on traditional manufacturing processes are unable to effectively capitalize AM advantages. The traditional designer’s mind-set in product design needs changing, which requires new design methods and guidance to be established. However, the majority of the design rules for AM developed so far is primarily on ‘‘feature-level,’’ namely, they can only ensure the manufacturability of the designed features in the final design stage. This fails to guide designers throughout the entire design process to exploit full potentials of AM processes. Therefore, this study proposes a design for AM (DfAM) framework to guide industrial/product designers to create an effective design for end-use plastic consumer products for series production. The framework is developed based on a practically proven design practice that is obtained from a series of interviews with professional design- ers and practitioners with significant experience in DfAM. It summarizes the DfAM principles and addresses major considerations in process selection, design process, and production. This article focuses on illustrating the framework using two detailed case studies showing the real design process for designing two products that are currently being sold on the market. The DfAM principles and considerations in manufacturing process selection, design, and production stages are presented, together with the advantages and disadvantages of the products being designed for AM. It demonstrates the importance of DfAM principles for creating a successful product design. Keywords: additive manufacturing, design for additive manufacturing, product design, plastic consumer goods, product innovation, design method Introduction The emergence of additive manufacturing (AM) is chang- ing the way that products are designed and manufactured. The application of AM has expanded to a wider spectrum, including not only aerospace and medical applications but also daily consumer goods market. 1 The layer-by-layer fab- rication characteristics distinguish AM from traditional pro- duction processes. As a result, the concept of design for AM (DfAM) has emerged, which aims to help designers capi- talize advantages of AM while circumventing the inherent limitations, maximizing product performance and reducing production costs. 2,3 The majority of the research relating to DfAM design guidelines and rules is on the feature-level, investigating the limit of a specific AM process capability in relation to achievable part quality, for example, minimum wall thick- ness producible by selective laser melting (SLM) 4 and self- supporting angle for fused deposition modeling (FDM). 5,6 Allison et al. 7 developed design rules that detail the achiev- able geometric resolution and accuracy in relation to build orientation, materials, and locations within the build chamber of the selective laser sintering (SLS) system. Kranz et al. 8 developed extensive SLM design rules, showing the dimen- sional accuracy and surface quality of a range of typical features (e.g., holes, cylinders, and thin walls) in relation to 1 School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. 2 EPSRC MAPP Future Manufacturing Hub, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom. 3 Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom. 3D PRINTING AND ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING Volume 00, Number 00, 2019 ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/3dp.2019.0079 1 Downloaded by 45.33.106.112 from www.liebertpub.com at 12/06/19. For personal use only.