Designing for laser sintering

Abstract

Until recently solid freeform fabrication (SFF) technology has been used mostly for production of prototype parts. However, as this technology matures, the initiative of utilising it for the manufacture of end-use products is establishing itself. As this tendency to use SFF for actual production runs increases, a demand is developing for sets of process-specific design for manufacture (DFM) guidelines that will assist designers who are designing parts for manufacture by a specific rapid manufacturing (RM) process. The purpose of this paper is to provideRMdesigners with such a series of processspecific design for manufacture guidelines.