Session: DFMLC-05-01-Design for Additive Manufacturing 1

Paper Number: 90063

90063 - Identifying the Effects of Immersion on Design for Additive Manufacturing Evaluation of Designs of Varying Manufacturability 

The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their
product development cycle. However, there is currently a deficit of designers sufficiently skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.

Presenting Author: Jayant Mathur Penn State

Presenting Author Biography: Jayant Mathur is a graduate research assistant in Mechanical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University.

Authors:

Jayant Mathur Penn State
Scarlett Miller Penn State
Timothy Simpson Penn State
Nicholas Meisel Penn State