INVESTIGATING THE TIMING OF DFAM INTERVENTIONS ON STUDENTS’ EARLY-STAGE DESIGNS FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

Additive manufacturing (AM) has revolutionized the manufacturing workforce. AM’s layer-by-layer approach to producing end-use parts enables designers to reduce material costs and create designs inconceivable with traditional processes. AM’s benefits have necessitated efforts to educate students on how to improve their designs for AM. Previous studies have explored design for AM (DfAM) interventions to address this need by providing students with a broad set of DfAM heuristics prior to participating in design challenges. While these studies have enhanced DfAM education, there are unanswered questions regarding when DfAM heuristics should be provided to students. Refining DfAM interventions with specific heuristics outlining the advantages (Opportunistic DfAM or O-DfAM) and limitations (Restrictive DfAM or R-DfAM) of AM can reveal how students apply DfAM heuristics to their designs based on intervention timing. This current work investigates early-stage designs for AM when the intervention timing is varied as students work through the engineering design process. It was found that students significantly applied certain O-DfAM heuristics when the intervention took place during converging, while certain R-DfAM heuristics were significantly applied when the intervention took place during diverging. These findings reveal the significance of how intervention can improve students’ early-stage designs for AM.