Concurrent Product and Process Design of an Additively Manufactured Engine Piston

Additive Manufacturing (AM) Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) metal processes enable significant design freedom, addressing design complexity in high-end sectors. To build performant products, several Design for Additive Manufacturing guidelines must be considered. Nevertheless, it is still noticeable a lack of reliability for AM processes, which is a key factor to guarantee both the expected enhanced product requirements and the manufacturability. Even though few rules and best practices to mitigate defects are provided either by standards or equipment suppliers, they are still missing approaches to predict build failures and process flaws, and therefore achieve faultless build processes. This work suggests a concurrent product and process design approach, in which Computer Aided Engineering tools are involved in both product and process design to identify the components’ shapes that match the expected performance and a feasible PBF build layout. An automotive component is the use case, whose design based on topology optimization and product validation is enriched by integrating the associated process simulation. The build process is modeled by (a) the additive manufacturing simulation to identify flaws and resources usage, and (b) the thermo-mechanical finite element -based simulation to predict residual stress and distortions. The approach based on CAD platforms integrates product and process design to reduce design iterations, trial-error practices, and build failures.