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<p>Additive manufacturing, despite its capability to produce complex geometries, often requires the use of temporary support structures. These supports are important to prevent part deformation, handle thermal stresses, and anchor parts during the fabrication of the part. However, they are a major contributor to material waste, slow down build times, and the associated post-processing costs and effort. This extensive review can be considered as a synthesis of different strategies used to minimize or eliminate support structures during predominant additive manufacturing using powder bed fusion, material extrusion, and vat photopolymerization. The review categorizes and evaluates various methods systematically, including design modifications using design for additive manufacturing principles and rules for overhang-aware geometry, advanced optimization techniques, such as topology optimization for self-supporting geometries, integrated support optimization, and multi-axis printable designs, build orientation optimization to reduce the volume of supports and enhance the quality of the part, scanning strategies and process parameter optimization for stabilizing overhangs, and innovative slicing and path planning methods such as adaptive and non-planar slicing. Furthermore, it reviews recent progress in support structure design in terms of minimal-contact structures and the construction of dissolvable or multi-material scaffolds. A comparative study implies that there is no universal optimal strategy and underscores the demand for hybrid workflows where multiple strategies are applied to find a trade-off between competing goals such as material usage, part quality and post-processing convenience. Despite a great deal of progress, there is still a critical research gap in the form of standardized benchmarks and data sets for the objective evaluation and comparison of different support minimization techniques. Filling this gap through the introduction of standardized models, quantitative comparison criteria, and uniform tolerances is a crucial step to enable strong research, accelerate innovation, and ultimately make the additive manufacturing processes more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable.</p>

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A comprehensive review of support structure minimization in additive manufacturing: design, orientation, optimization, and process strategies

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月3日

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  • Muhammad Ayan Chaudhary,
  • Washmah Kashif,
  • Zaka Ullah

摘要

Additive manufacturing, despite its capability to produce complex geometries, often requires the use of temporary support structures. These supports are important to prevent part deformation, handle thermal stresses, and anchor parts during the fabrication of the part. However, they are a major contributor to material waste, slow down build times, and the associated post-processing costs and effort. This extensive review can be considered as a synthesis of different strategies used to minimize or eliminate support structures during predominant additive manufacturing using powder bed fusion, material extrusion, and vat photopolymerization. The review categorizes and evaluates various methods systematically, including design modifications using design for additive manufacturing principles and rules for overhang-aware geometry, advanced optimization techniques, such as topology optimization for self-supporting geometries, integrated support optimization, and multi-axis printable designs, build orientation optimization to reduce the volume of supports and enhance the quality of the part, scanning strategies and process parameter optimization for stabilizing overhangs, and innovative slicing and path planning methods such as adaptive and non-planar slicing. Furthermore, it reviews recent progress in support structure design in terms of minimal-contact structures and the construction of dissolvable or multi-material scaffolds. A comparative study implies that there is no universal optimal strategy and underscores the demand for hybrid workflows where multiple strategies are applied to find a trade-off between competing goals such as material usage, part quality and post-processing convenience. Despite a great deal of progress, there is still a critical research gap in the form of standardized benchmarks and data sets for the objective evaluation and comparison of different support minimization techniques. Filling this gap through the introduction of standardized models, quantitative comparison criteria, and uniform tolerances is a crucial step to enable strong research, accelerate innovation, and ultimately make the additive manufacturing processes more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable.