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Design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) guidelines are important for helping designers avoid iterations and leverage the design freedoms afforded by additive manufacturing (AM). Comprehensive design guidelines should incorporate a variety of features of interest to designers, and given the wide variety of AM processes and their associated capabilities and limitations, those guidelines may need to be process- or even machine-specific. One way to generate detailed DFAM guidelines is to implement a metrology study focused on a strategically designed test part. This paper describes how quantitative design guidelines are compiled for a polymer selective laser sintering (SLS) process via a metrology study. As part of the metrology study, a test part is designed to focus specifically on geometric resolution and accuracy of the polymer SLS process. The test part is compact, allowing it to be easily inserted into existing SLS builds and therefore eliminating the need for dedicated metrology builds. To build a statistical foundation upon which design guidelines can be compiled, multiple copies of the test part are fabricated within existing commercial builds in a factorial study with materials, build orientations, and locations within the build chamber as control factors. Design guidelines are established by measuring and analyzing the as-built test parts. The guidelines are summarized in this paper and documented in a publicly accessible, online web tool.

A composite material system comprised of a monostable negative stiffness (NS) structure within a polymer matrix was designed, fabricated, and experimentally evaluated. The monostable negative stiffness (NS) structure was designed using a combination of analytical and numerical models and manufactured in stainless steel. The NS structure was arranged in parallel with different polymer matrices to experimentally evaluate the effects of the matrix properties on the overall stiffness and energy dissipation of the composite NS-matrix system when loaded in uniaxial compression. A strong influence of the matrix properties on the stiffness and energy absorption capacity of the composite system was observed. Unlike conventional composites for which there is a natural tradeoff between stiffness and energy absorption capacity, the composite NS-matrix system enhanced stiffness while simultaneously improving energy absorption relative to a neat matrix, but only when the stiffness of the matrix was carefully matched to the stiffness of the NS structure.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has many potential industrial applications because highly complex parts can be fabricated with little or no tooling cost. One barrier to widespread use of AM, however, is that many designers lack detailed information about the capabilities and limitations of each process. To compile statistical design guidelines, comprehensive, statistically meaningful metrology studies need to be performed on AM technologies. In this paper, a test part is designed to evaluate the accuracy and resolution of the polymer powder bed fusion (PBF) or selective laser sintering process for a wide variety of features. The unique construction of this test part allows it to maximize feature density while maintaining a small build volume. As a result, it can easily fit into most existing selective laser sintering builds, without requiring dedicated builds, thereby facilitating the repetitive fabrication necessary for building statistical databases of design allowables. By inserting the part into existing builds, it is also possible to monitor geometric accuracy and resolution on a build- and machine-specific basis in much the same way that tensile bars are inserted to monitor structural properties. This paper describes the test part and its features along with a brief description of the measurements performed on it and a representative sample of the types of geometric data derived from it.