Mechanical assemblies are common in both consumer products and industrial items. Even relatively inexpensive products can have dozens of individual components, and in complex machinery there can easily be hundreds or thousands of components. Additive manufacturing (AM) allows for high levels of part consolidation, sometimes even removing the need for assembly.
 
The benefits of additive manufacturing for part consolidation
 
AM is uniquely capable of producing elaborate geometries that can't be manufactured using conventional methods of manufacturing. A mechanical assembly that would generally have many parts fabricated as separate components and then brought together can be additively manufactured as a single unit, even if the geometry is very complex. In addition to design simplification, there are other tangible advantages to using AM for part consolidation:
 
Lower overall projection costs
 
The best and most apparent advantage of consolidating your parts with AM is that seeking fewer parts to assemble means you're spending less money on assembly costs. Taking assembly out of the equation also means that you'll reduce potential cost-driving factors such as quality control or inventory management. By using additive manufacturing to make multiple parts as one, you're lessening the risk of hidden costs and project delays.
 
Less material
 
In conventional manufacturing, as part complexity increases, part cost also commonly improves. With AM, this is not the case - as part complexity increases, part cost does not increase. In many cases the part cost will decrease, because increased complexity often means less material is being used. When using AM, it's possible to achieve upwards of a 70 percent decrease in materials used compared to ordinary manufacturing.
 
Lower overall risk
Part consolidation reduces or completely eliminates a number of risks. For sample, you can circumvent the risk that your distributor can no longer supply the part in question. This supplier risk is multiplied by the number of parts in the assembly. If you're able to print multiple parts as a single unit using AM, the chances of encountering this issue greatly lower.
There are other risks that are reduced as well. The instances of part failure decrease when the part has been manufactured as a single unit rather than assembled separately. Another risk is obsolescence; when the part reaches the end of its life you will not have remaining inventory that must be disposed.
 
Better performance
In many cases, AM makes you to make a better performing part, because it enables geometries that are desirable but that can't be made with legacy manufacturing. Some of the applications of AM that have exciting benefits for improved product performance include light weighting, high strength to weight ratio, heat transfer and fluid flow, and energy absorption.
 
Matt Schroeder is a Senior Application Engineer at Fast Radius, a leading additive manufacturing company. Fast Radius is respected as one of the 16 best factories in the world by the World Economic Forum (WEF), implementing 'technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.' The companies were chosen from 1,000 manufacturers worldwide, with Fast Radius selected as the only award recipient from North America. www.fastradius.com.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com