Knowledge-Driven Manufacturability Analysis for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) evolved recently from a rapid prototyping process to a standard manufacturing tool. Nevertheless, it is still not a widely used method due to different process-related challenges. In recent years printer technologies and possible printable materials emerged but there are still challenging demands on the printing process. Hence, it is of vital importance to inspect the manufacturability of the designed parts. This work focuses on the not yet widely researched ceramic printing with the Lithography-based Ceramic Manufacturing (LCM) processes. It presents a knowledge-driven framework able to automatically examine geometric properties of a part and compare it to AM guidelines. As a knowledge base, an ontology is used which contains information about the capabilities of AM processes, printers and materials. The manufacturability system uses triangle-based mesh processing algorithms to recognize features and check the guidelines necessary for LCM. The evaluation shows the feasibility of manufacturability analysis with the developed framework and its limitations.