Proposition of a Geometric Complexity Model for Additive Manufacturing Process Based on CAD

摘要

Additive manufacturing techniques has great potential for manufacturing metal or polymer components with very high geometric complexity. This family of processes is now experiencing significant growth and is at the origin of intense research activity (optimization of topology, biomedical applications, etc.). One of the characteristics of this method is that the geometric complexity is free. The complexity of a CAD model is also a field of research. The basic idea is that the complexity of a component has implications in design and especially in manufacturing. Indeed, industrial competitiveness in the mechanical field generated the need to produce increasingly complex systems and parts (in terms of topology, functionality...). In the present work, we propose a complexity metric model based solely on the geometric information found in ComputerAided Design (CAD) file. The proposed metric is a multiplicative model. Our investigation is based on the analysis of different parts picked from our technical document database. The first results of our work demonstrate that our model is highly correlated to a part’s evaluated complexity. Nonetheless, with its current quality, our model could help engineering teams identify high-complexity products as early as the design phase.