Design Seven Tips for Design

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From design freedom to industrial reality in additive manufacturing, through AI-supported crack detection in material selection, to affordable sand 3D printing for foundries—the tips are as diverse as design itself.

From Design Freedom to Industrial Reality

"At the beginning of my career, the biggest challenge in additive manufacturing (AM) was to fully utilize design freedom while ensuring that a component could even be printed," says Dries Vandecruys, Technical Manager at Materialise. "Today, I spend significantly more time thinking about how a component is manufactured, post-processed, tested, and qualified, as these decisions are critical in determining whether a design can later be successfully transitioned into production." Design freedom remains one of the greatest strengths of additive manufacturing. However, industrial success also depends on build orientation, support strategy, material selection, post-processing, and part analysis. These factors influence costs, quality, and repeatability and must be considered from the outset, alongside geometry. If addressed only at a later stage, development cycles are prolonged, design steps must be repeated, and unnecessary costs arise. A project to redesign a gripper made of metal illustrates this. A printable 1:1 replacement for the original part offered little added value. It was only when geometry, manufacturing strategy, and production process were developed together that the redesign provided real benefits: multiple components were combined into a single part, an assembly step was eliminated, the weight was reduced from 237 to 60 grams (approx. 8.36 to 2.12 oz), and production costs were reduced by around 70 percent. In industrial additive manufacturing, the manufacturing strategy must co-determine the design from the very beginning.