Developing a Computer Program for Material Selection to be Produced by Additive Manufacturing

In this study, a program called additive manufacturing guide (AM Guide) based on Excel VBA was constructed with a database that contains 401 different materials from 46 main material groups used in AM processes. This program could suggest material selection advice for 14 different material selection criteria for the part to be designed. In addition, the program could suggest seven frequently preferred design parameters or boundary conditions in terms of manufacturability for 21 basic materials in four main material groups. As a result of the study, the developed program (AM Guide) was tested with four case studies from the extant literature and presented the advantage of the material selection for the AM environments. For AM technology to be used effectively and become widespread, it is necessary to have foresight and perspective in terms of material choices. In this context, there is a need for a guide to users on issues such as material selection of the parts to be produced with AM technologies. Three benchmark examples were conducted in this paper. For the first example, the developed AM guide offered 91 different alternative materials against the six alternatives for the same problem from the extant literature. Also, the developed AM guide proposed 134 and 122 different materials for cases 2 and 3, respectively, against 5 and 6 alternatives offered from the extant literature for the same cases.