Automated design of additive manufactured flow components with consideration of overhang constraint

When designing parts for additive manufacturing (AM), users must consider manufacturing restrictions specific to the chosen AM production technology. For material extrusion or laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF), users need to follow design rules such as avoiding geometries with critical overhangs. If users create the 3D part geometry manually using computer-aided design (CAD), the consideration of design rules can be challenging and time-consuming. Especially for complex-shaped parts, novice designers may need multiple loops to analyze and modify CAD features for manufacturability. This manual process prevents users to quickly transfer the layout design of a part into the corresponding production-ready 3D part geometry. Therefore, it is highly desirable to automate the manual CAD process, including the consideration of AM restrictions. This work aims to automate the CAD-based design of AM parts with fluid flow channels. For this purpose, the work presents automated procedures that generate and modify design features such that they automatically comply with the AM overhang constraint. The procedures focus on flow components such as hydraulic manifolds and include design features such as support-free flow channels, integrated and sacrificial supports, and other features such as boreholes, interfaces, ribs, and channel branches. To enforce the overhang constraint in the generation of features, users define the part orientation to the build direction, and values for the minimum build angle and maximum allowed diameter of horizontally oriented circular cross-sections. As a benchmark, the work demonstrates the procedures by revisiting an earlier AM hydraulic manifold. Given restrictions of L-PBF of stainless steel, the study uses the procedures to generate manufacturable 3D manifold designs for different part orientations. One of the manifold variants is fabricated to show the manufacturability of the generated 3D part designs. The work finishes by discussing the benefits of the procedures, their transferability, and enhancements to generate manufacturable and functionally optimized designs. •Automated CAD-based procedures to generate production-ready 3D part designs for AM parts with fluid flow channels.•Generation of support-free flow channels by modifying cross-section shapes to avoid critical internal overhangs.•Generation of integrated and sacrificial support structures for outer walls of flow channels.•Generation of manufacturable detailed features such as bo