Session: CIE-05-01CIE Graduate Student Poster Symposium

Paper Number: 74749

Start Time: August 18, 10:00 AM

74749 - Energy Savings Using Part Decomposition for Assembly-Based Design in Additive Manufacturing 

Additive manufacturing (AM) provides the pathway for producing parts with complex shapes that cannot be produced using traditional manufacturing processes. Within AM, part decomposition for assembly-based design is an area of interest. It has been discussed in the literature that part decomposition for AM can improve productivity by decreasing the total processing time compared to products build without part decomposition. Along similar lines, this work demonstrates that part decomposition for assembly-based design can be utilized to improve economic productivity by decreasing energy consumption in AM processes. This work discusses an optimization-based algorithm for part decomposition to decrease energy consumption in AM. The method uses planar cuts for part decomposition and the optimized planar cuts are generated using Genetic Algorithm (GA).

The method has been developed for selective laser sintering (SLS) AM process. GA has been successfully implemented in this method to find optimal cutting planes from infinite number of cutting planes. The cutting planes forms the chromosomes and the planes are generated using points and vectors which act as the genes of the chromosomes. The reason for defining the planes using points and normal vectors is that these two basic entities can be used to completely define a plane. The points in this method are the vertices of the triangles of the STL file and the associated vectors are generated randomly. A heuristic crossover method is used as it is found to be more efficient for solution space exploration compared to other methods such as single point crossover. The crossover probability is set to 0.8 and mutation probability is set to 0.1.

The first step in the proposed method is to decompose the 3D model into two parts using an optimized cutting plane. Once the two parts are obtained, the total energy consumption is recalculated which now includes the energy required during assembly of two decomposed parts as the parts have to be eventually assembled. However, the energy required for assembly is found to be much smaller compared to the energy needed to print the two parts. The termination criteria for the process is set to 10 % or more reduction from the original energy consumption. The original energy consumption is defined as the energy required for producing the part without decomposition. The process is continued until the 10% reduction in energy consumption criteria is met. If the 10 % energy reduction criteria is not met after a decomposition iteration, the part with the highest volume is selected for subsequent step and decomposed further. The method is demonstrated for SLS AM printing using two examples yielding an energy savings of more than 10 % in both cases.

Presenting Author: Angshuman Deka University at Buffalo, SUNY

Authors:

Angshuman Deka University at Buffalo, SUNY