The design and the development of a product is accomplished through the whole of many ideas, including the need of selecting the most suitable ones according to the technical and economic specifications. The procedure is usually iterative, converging only if the decisions are accurate at each single step. Some researchers have committed to the axiomatic design methodology. It is a methodology that, through axiomatic rules, aids design through the systematic analysis and the formalization of customers’ needs through functional requisites, design parameters and process variables. Therefore, through a set of functional requisites, it represents the synthesis of the design targets, while design parameters are the means to reach the requisites through the aid of the design matrix, which indicates the existing relation by means of single model. In this way, a project is defined as the interaction between the functional domain and the physical domain, represented by a hierarchy of functional requisites and of process parameters. The proposed model implements a sequence of design rules, customizable according to the specific requirement, which the designer implements during the development work. The proposed methodology is used for both the development of new products and the re-design of the existing products that are engineered through the conventional manufacturing. A study case is presented for the method validation, highlighting that it can be used for the validation of designs and of the decisional process. For the validation of the proposed method, they have considered a bracket that is traditionally produced by milling a block of 6082-T6 aluminium alloy. The bracket is composed by three small notches on the upper surface that are used to position and to fix the bracket by using three screws. The bracket must operate with existing fixing components. The final part must be as light as possible and easily cleaned. The method has been validated for the manufacturing case of a component. On the basis of such combined approach, designers can exploit the process capacities in order to engineer complex designs using unexplored regions of the design space and to evaluate their creativity by using the axiomatic design.
Source: Konstantinos Salonitis, «Design for additive manufacturing based on the axiomatic design method», The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, pp. 1-8, (2016). DOI: 10.1007/s00170-016-8540-5
