Driving Technologies for the Design of Additive Manufacturing Systems

The Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology, belonging to the most comprehensive Net Shape Forming family, has in recent years a growing trend due to the increasing quality of the built product. These results may open the application of the AM to the industrial field, moving the application from laboratories to the plant floor. This step requires machines capable of executing the technology process of AM with the requirements of the industrial environment, concerning as example the production speed, reliability, robustness, and process stability. The design of such type of machinery requires a systematic and multidisciplinary approach for reaching these industrial targets. Indeed the AM process involves several design technological issues, like temperature control of the material to be processed, characteristics of the energy source for material transition, control of the power transferred to the material, scanning system’s head control, 3D model’s layer definition, generation of the laser point’s trajectories. The final product’s quality strongly depends on all these aspects synergically linked each other, as well as on the technical solutions to realize them. The paper presents an interdisciplinary approach to the design of machines for AM, based on the Powder Bed Fusion process, and targeted to the industrial field. The technological platforms discussed in the paper are essential for such type of machines. The strategy proposed constitutes a base reference point for the definition of a methodological approach to the design of AM machinery.