Prof. Giovanni Moroni, Politecnico di Milano, Italy 

Title

A volumetric lifecycle management for additive manufacturing 

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing is an emerging technology, and emerging technologies need new approaches. The main advantage of additive manufacturing is its capacity to allow “complexity for free”, i.e. manufacturing complex geometries without an increase in costs.

In past years, complexity has been represented by boundary representations, like surface tessellation representation (STL). But it is the volumetric nature of additive manufacturing that grants its geometric freedom, in manufacturing both external and internal geometries.

What it is envisaged is a purely volumetric lifecycle management of additive manufacturing parts. At design stage, an “enriched volumetric representation”, capable of representing different material, geometric features and tolerances, and functionalities of parts, should be adopted to guarantee the necessary flexibility of representation. At manufacturing level, the use of the volumetric representation eases the generation of the deposition path, which becomes a “fill the volume” problem, simple to manage and simulate. Finally, a volumetric representation is totally coherent with a verification by X-Ray computed tomography. Today, X-Ray computed tomography is the sole inspection technology allowing the same freedom in verification granted by additive manufacturing in production. And X-Ray computed tomography measures parts volumetrically.

The proposed contribution is aimed at pointing out the advantages of the volumetric lifecycle management in additive manufacturing, and the issues still to solve.

Biography

Giovanni Moroni received the Laurea degree cum laude in Industrial and Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), where currently he is Full Professor in Manufacturing Technology and Systems. He is the head of the Manufacturing and Production Systems Research Line of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Politecnico di Milano and member of the Scientific Commission of the Department. The Mechanical Engineering Department is among the Department of Excellence of the Ministry of Education, University, and Research, since 2018. He is member of the Italian Association for Manufacturing – AITeM, Associate Member of CIRP The International Academy for Production Engineering, and founding member of the E-GRT European Group of Research in Tolerancing. From January 2015 to December 2017 he has been China National High-end Foreign Experts at School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, P.R. of China. His main activities are related to geometrical product specification and verification, knowledge-based process planning, digital manufacturing, and additive manufacturing.