Systematic biomimetic part design for additive manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) provides an industrially relevant technology for serial production of complex parts. A layer-wise buildup permits an innovative product design, for instance via functional integration, lightweight design following biomimetic principles. This results in a vast design solution space for product optimization. Exhausting the potential of AM relies on a systematic and economic design phase. The wide range of the design solution space prevents an economic exploitation of design freedom and results in an incomplete part optimization. This leads to an unsystematic design, a cost-intensive and long term trial-and-error part design optimization. This paper presents a systematic design approach. A situative application-and target-oriented TRIZ-based methodology is introduced that incorporates database-enhanced biomimetic part design specifically for AM. Inspired by nature those examples provide a vast design solution space due to an extensive evolutionary development of various optimized systems. The work is concluded with a validation through a case study of a design optimization problem.