Metal AM Spring 2017

Page 93

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AM Case Study

The science behind a basic consumer product: Bottle openers by metal Additive Manufacturing Bottle openers manufactured by metal Additive Manufacturing have become a popular promotional gift, with a variety of designs produced by AM technology suppliers. In the first of a new series of design oriented articles for Metal Additive Manufacturing magazine, Olaf Diegel and Terry Wohlers reveal how these products effectively demonstrate several key concepts that designers need to understand in the development of parts for production by metal AM.

Bottle openers have long demonstrated the benefits of Additive Manufacturing. Methods of topology optimisation and lightweighting, coupled with ‘complexity for free’, clearly show what is possible with metal AM. Also, they make a great gift that people will use and enjoy showing to others when discussing the subject of Additive Manufacturing (Figs. 1, 2). But what do these bottle openers really show and is it possible to quantify some of their benefits to truly grasp the advantages offered by Additive Manufacturing? Are they little more than a trinket or do they really reveal the power and utility of metal AM? Conventional manufacturing processes are typically sub-optimal in their use of material. This is because the shape of a part is largely driven by the ease of the manufacturing process. A lack of design optimisation reveals itself when a stress analysis is performed. Some regions of a part will be highly stressed, while others have very low stress values, indicating that too much material is present. The

Vol. 3 No. 1 © 2017 Inovar Communications Ltd

geometric freedom offered by AM enables parts to be designed to the same functional specifications as conventional parts but with less material. This is often referred to as lightweighting a part. Approaches to lightweighting can be performed

using standard CAD methods, such as reducing the thickness of features in low-stress regions. However, to achieve a high degree of weight savings across an entire part, topology optimisation is required.

Fig. 1 Bottle openers by 3D Systems (top) and Renishaw (bottom)

Metal Additive Manufacturing | Spring 2017

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