Investigation of professional design practice:  A framework for designing plastic consumer products for additive manufacturing

Wei Liu; Zicheng Zhu; Songhe Ye; Xiaoneng Jin; Guanghe Yan

doi:10.1504/IJMPT.2019.097663

Investigation of professional design practice: A framework for designing plastic consumer products for additive manufacturing

Wei Liu
, Zicheng Zhu^*
, Songhe Ye
, Xiaoneng Jin
, Guanghe Yan

^*Corresponding author for this work

University of Sheffield
University of Cambridge
Tongji University

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Revolutionary advances in plastic additive manufacturing (AM) have enabled it to evolve to be an economic viable production method for manufacturing consumer products in our daily lives. The capability of creating complex structures opens up vast design freedoms, which consequently requires new design mind-sets and methods to be developed to take advantage of this emerging technology whilst minimising inherent process drawbacks. This study investigates professional design practice in design for plastic AM. A framework that shows an effective way to design products is developed, enabling efficient low to medium volume production using plastic AM processes. The major factors and design considerations including AM process characteristics, materials, product appearance, functionality and production economic viability that affect the design of a consumer product are described. A case study of a night lamp manufactured by selective laser sintering is conducted, demonstrating that plastic AM is a feasible and reliable production route for consumer goods.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	104-128
Number of pages	25
Journal	International Journal of Materials and Product Technology
Volume	58
Issue number	2-3
Early online date	17 Dec 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMPT.2019.097663
Publication status	Published - 4 Feb 2019

Funding

Biographical notes: Wei Liu is the Assistant Dean and a Professorial Research Fellow at the College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University. She accomplished her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Business School. Her research interests fall in design for additive manufacturing, design management and innovative methods for product design. She led several international and national level research projects and obtained research funding from National Nature Science Foundation of China and Product Development and Management Association. This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 51705367). The authors would also like to thank the design consultancies and AM bureaux that participated in the interviews.

Keywords

3D printing
Design for additive manufacturing
Design method
Design process
Plastic consumer goods

Access to Document

10.1504/IJMPT.2019.097663

Cite this

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