Design and Testing of Additively Manufactured Parts

Additive manufacturing technologies have developed substantially in the last decade. More resilient materials, more advanced capabilities in precision and printable geometries, and more economical mechanisms have all been introduced to the market at the industrial scale, for hobbyists, and everywhere in between. The advent of 3D printing has not and likely will not replace traditional manufacturing, but it does complement traditional methods by facilitating the manufacture of complex parts that would be impossible or too expensive to produce otherwise. Given the availability of 3D print technology, new design options become available. New methods and rules of thumb should be developed to make the most of these technologies, to extend but also integrate additively manufactured parts into assembly designs with traditionally manufactured parts as well. This project has explored several design opportunities opened by additive manufacturing technology. In particular, bound metal deposition (BMD) technology is explored to leverage printers typically used for plastics to fabricate complex parts in stainless steel and multi-material parts with either plastics or stainless steel alloys. Extensive material-level testing provides insight into material properties for cured photopolymer resin, facilitating an optimal design study on a wing section airframe, maximizing the strength-to-weight ratio of the structure. The high geometric resolution of resin prints makes possible the fabrication of acoustical materials through printing triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) mathematically designed in Matlab. An impedance tube has been designed and built to test the absorption coefficients for several geometries. Each thrust of the project develops design capabilities unique to additive manufacturing technologies, hopefully leading to further development and testing in future work.