Examining Potential Design Guidelines for Use in Fused Deposition Modeling to Reduce Build Time and Material Volume

This paper presents work to create a preliminary set of design guidelines for use in Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The experimentation uses build protocol for a Dimension SST Fused Deposition Modeler. Using simulation software known as Catalyst, build time and material volume characteristics of many components of varying size and complexity were calculated. A series of potential guidelines were independently applied to this same set of components. By comparing the new simulated data with the baseline, statistically significant improvements in these two metrics denoted those guidelines which passed a quantitative feasibility test. The results show that six design rules show universal advantage, with two more needing further examination. Future work will lie in examining the feasibility of implementing the changes proposed by the guidelines with respect to desired product functionality. Additionally, correlations related to the application of several guidelines simultaneously need to be determined.