Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly growing technology within the industry and education sectors. Despite this, there lacks a comprehensive tool to guide AM novices in evaluating the suitability of a given design for fabrication by the range of AM processes. Existing design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) evaluation tools tend to focus on only certain key process-dependent DfAM considerations. By contrast, the purpose of this research is to propose a tool that guides a user to comprehensively evaluate their chosen design and educates the user on an appropriate DfAM strategy. The tool incorporates both opportunistic and restrictive elements, integrates the seven major AM processes, outputs an evaluative score, and recommends processes and improvements for the input design. This paper presents a thorough framework for this evaluation tool and details the inclusion of features such as dual-DfAM consideration, process recommendations, and a weighting system for restrictive DfAM. The result is a detailed recommendation output that helps users to determine not only “Can you print your design?” but also “Should you print your design?” by combining several key research studies to build a comprehensive user design tool. This research also demonstrates the potential of the framework through a series of user-based studies, in which the opportunistic side of the tool was found to have significantly improved novice designers’ ability to evaluate designs. The preliminary framework presented in this paper establishes a foundation for future studies to refine the tool’s accuracy using more data and expert analysis.

Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM.

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables the fabrication of geometrically complex designs through layer-by-layer joining of material along single or multiple directions. To determine favorable design and manufacturing solutions, designers must navigate this 3D spatial complexity while ensuring the functionality and manufacturability of their designs. Evaluating the manufacturability of their solutions necessitates modalities that help naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Digitally non-immersive visualization can reduce this expense, but digital immersion has the potential to further improve the experience before building. This research investigates how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect a designer’s approach to solving a build-with-AM (BAM) problem and its outcomes. First, it studies how immersion affects determining favorable build orientations when considering the additive manufacturability outcomes of designs of varying complexity. Second, it studies how immersion affects the participants’ experiential outcomes, including evaluation time, attempts made, and cognitive load when solving the BAM problem. Analysis reveals that as design complexity increases, visualizing and manufacturing designs in VR improves additive manufacturability outcomes by reducing build time and support material usage compared to CAx, reducing manufacturing costs by up to 4.61% ($32) per part. Using immersive VR also helps designers determine favorable build orientations faster with fewer attempts and without increasing the cognitive load experienced. These findings present important implications for the role of immersive experiences in preparing designers to quickly produce lower-cost and sustainable manufacturing solutions with AM.

Abstract Applications for additive manufacturing (AM) continue to increase as more industries adopt the technology within their product development processes. There is a growing demand for designers to acquire and hone their design for AM (DfAM) intuition and generate innovative solutions with AM. Resources that promote DfAM intuition, however, historically default to physical or digitally non-immersive modalities. Immersive virtual reality (VR) naturally supports 3D spatial perception and reasoning, suggesting its intuitive role in evaluating geometrically complex designs and fostering DfAM intuition. However, the effects of immersion on DfAM evaluations are not well-established in the literature. This study contributes to this gap in the literature by examining DfAM evaluations for a variety of designs across modalities using varying degrees of immersion. Specifically, it observes the effects on the outcomes of the DfAM evaluation, the effort required of evaluators, and their engagement with the designs. Findings indicate that the outcomes from DfAM evaluations in immersive and non-immersive modalities are similar without statistically observable differences in the cognitive load experienced during the evaluations. Active engagement with the designs, however, is observed to be significantly different between immersive and non-immersive modalities. By contrast, passive engagement remains similar across the modalities. These findings have interesting implications on how organizations train designers in DfAM, as well as on the role of immersive modalities in design processes. Organizations can provide DfAM resources across different levels of immersion, enabling designers to customize how they acquire DfAM intuition and solve complex engineering problems.

Although the additive manufacturing (AM) market continues to grow, industries face barriers to AM adoption due to a shortage of skilled designers in the workforce that can apply AM effectively to meet this demand. This shortage is attributed to the high cost and infrastructural requirements of introducing high- barrier-to-entry AM processes such as powder bed fusion (PBF) into in-person learning environments. To meet the demands for a skilled AM workforce, it is important to explore other mediums of AM education, such as computer-aided instruction (CAI) and virtual reality (VR), which can increase access to hands-on learning experiences for inaccessible AM processes. However, limited work compares virtual and physical AM instruction or explores how the differences in immersion and presence between mediums can affect the knowledge gained and the mental effort exerted when learning about different AM processes. To address this gap in the literature, this research evaluates the use of CAI, VR, and in-person instruction in AM process education when learning about material extrusion (ME) and PBF. Our findings show that the differences in immersion and presence between CAI, VR, and in-person instruction do not have a statistically significant effect when learning about ME, but do have a significant effect when learning about PBF. Specifically, we found that VR generally yields equivalent effects in knowledge gain and cognitive load to in-person PBF education while offering advantages in both metrics over CAI learning. The findings from this work thus have significant implications for using VR as an alternative to in-person training to improve designer development in process-centric AM education of typically high-barrier-to-entry AM processes.

Adopting additive manufacturing (AM) in product design is a challenge for organizations due to a shortage of skilled designers who can effectively use AM to address emerging engineering problems. The development of institutional talent in AM and design for AM (DfAM) is crucial for organizations looking to leverage AM capabilities. Therefore, designers need meaningful active experiences that highlight the advantages and limitations of AM technologies to enable informed artifact generation during the design process. However, limited access to active in-person learning experiences with industrial AM systems and knowledge to support the design of AM artifacts is a major hurdle to AM talent development. Digital modalities of AM education, such as computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) tools, can therefore increase access to experiential learning to cultivate DfAM intuition. There is a gap in the literature, however, that investigates and compares immersive and non-immersive modalities in AM and studies their effectiveness in training and artifact generation. Additionally, there is a scarcity of information on the design process behind creating immersive experiences that can support these research endeavors. It is essential to investigate design guidelines and heuristics for creating immersive experiences that are meaningful and effective for AM and DfAM training. This research is thus motivated to explore the design and application of immersive and non-immersive digital modalities in AM and DfAM. The presented work here investigates the design of immersive VR user experiences for this purpose with support from the literature and findings in previously published work.

Adopting additive manufacturing (AM) in product design is limited by the shortage of skilled designers with design for AM (DfAM) expertise. This lack of AM talent is a major hurdle for organizations looking for innovative solutions to solve emerging engineering problems. Developing institutional talent in DfAM and AM process knowledge is of paramount importance to support organizations looking to leverage AM. Therefore, future designers need meaningful experiences to acquire DfAM intuition and AM process competency to enable informed artifact generation during the design process. This necessitates supplying active experiences that highlight the advantages and limitations of AM technologies and promote DfAM intuition. However, limited access to in-person experiences with physical AM systems inhibits designers from gaining such intuition. Digital modalities of AM education, such as computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) tools, can alternatively provide access to experiential learning to cultivate this AM expertise. Where CAx experiences are typically associated with non-immersive modalities, VR experiences can offer enhanced immersion to replicate in-person experiences. There is a gap in the literature, however, that investigates immersive and non-immersive modalities on their effectiveness in training and artifact generation for AM. Additionally, there is a scarcity of information on design guides for creating immersive experiences that can support these research endeavors. It is essential to establish guidance on designing immersive experiences that offer meaningful and active engagement with AM technologies. Such guidance will support the development of experiences that cultivate DfAM intuition, AM process competency, and problem-solving skills. This research is thus motivated to explore the design of immersive VR experiences for problem-solving and artifact generation with AM. For this purpose, this work presents a generalized framework to inform the design of such experiences along with an example created using the proposed framework.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly growing technology within the industry and education sectors. Despite this, there lacks a comprehensive tool to guide AM-novices in evaluating the suitability of a given design for fabrication by the range of AM processes. Existing design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) evaluation tools tend to focus on only certain key process-dependent DfAM considerations. By contrast the purpose of this research is to propose a tool that guides a user to comprehensively evaluate their chosen design and educates the user on an appropriate DfAM strategy. The tool incorporates both opportunistic and restrictive elements, integrates the seven major AM processes and outputs an evaluative score and recommends processes and improvements for the input design. The paper presents a thorough framework for this evaluation tool and details the inclusion of features such as dual-DfAM consideration, process recommendations, and a weighting system for restrictive DfAM. The result is a detailed recommendation output that helps users to determine not only “can you print your design” but also “should you print your design” by combining several key research studies to build a comprehensive user design tool. This research demonstrates the potential of the framework through a series of case studies geometries. The preliminary framework presented in this paper establishes a foundation for future studies to refine the tool’s accuracy using more data and expert analysis.

The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.

Although there is a substantial growth in the Additive Manufacturing (AM) market commensurate with the demand for products produced by AM methods, there is a shortage of skilled designers in the workforce that can apply AM effectively to meet this demand. This is due to the innate complications with cost and infrastructure for high-barrier-to-entry AM processes such as powder bed fusion when attempting to educate designers about these processes through in-person learning. To meet the demands for a skilled AM workforce while also accounting for the limited access to the range of AM processes, it is important to explore other mediums of AM education such as computer-aided instruction (CAI) which can increase access to hands-on learning experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of CAI in AM process education and focus on its effects on knowledge gain and cognitive load. Our findings show that when designers are educated about material extrusion and powder bed fusion through CAI, the knowledge gain for powder bed fusion is significantly different than knowledge gain for material extrusion, with no significant difference in cognitive load between these two AM processes. These findings imply that there is potential in virtual mediums to improve a designer’s process-centric knowledge for the full range of AM processes including those that are usually inaccessible. We take these findings to begin developing recommendations and guidelines for the use of virtual mediums in AM education and future research that investigates implications for virtual AM education.

With an increase in the number of mobile apps making their way to users, there is a growing need for tools to support the app design process. While many tools focus on increasing the pace of development, few attempt to aide the designer in generating more creative solutions. In this work, we take creativity as the combination of novelty and utility. Particularly during development of user interfaces, assessment of utility (primarily usability) is iterative, rigorous, and time-consuming. The objective of the proposed work is to explore and evaluate the use of machine learning to predict usability measures for mobile app interfaces as a means to automate usability evaluations. Specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to accurately (nearly 90%) predict three usability measures: regularity, complexity, and touchability. This tool automates the assessment of utility in app design, freeing up the designer to seek designs that are novel and thus creative.

This paper proposes an augmented reality (AR) framework and tool on smartphones as an alternative to conventional inspection for AM parts. The framework attempts to introduce the rapid inspection potential of smartphone based AR within manufacturing by leveraging the manufacturing capability of additive manufacturing (AM) to integrate markers onto AM parts. The key step from this framework that is explored in this paper is the design and quality assessment of AM markers for marker registration. As part of the marker design and quality assessment objectives, this research conducts an evaluation on the effects of different AM processes on the quality of augmentation achieved from AM fiducial markers. Furthermore, it evaluates the minimum fiducial pattern size that on integration onto AM parts will be viable for augmentation. The results suggest that the AM process and the size of the fiducial pattern play a significant role in determining the quality of the AM markers. The paper concludes by stating that dual material extrusion AM markers provide the highest number of detectable features and therefore the highest quality of AM markers, and the smallest viable fiducial pattern for Cybercode/QR code marker can be sized at 19 × 19mm2.

. Interstitial implants using lr-192 wire has vast applications in the management of head & neck, breast and gynecological malignancies. Since the availability of lr-192 wire from BRIT, major hurdle has been overcome in India. But still there is great difficulty in procuring protective devices like storage lead pot, transportation trolly, lead screens, wire cutter and loader, etc. Another problem faced is in procuring plastic tubes of required specification, specially the inner plastic tubes which carry the lr-192 wire, and various accessories required for special situations. Third group of problem is learning the technical skills in performing the therapy in various sites. Most of the radiotherapy teaching centers in India do not have this facility. Hence there is no practical training. Further comprehensive books on this subject giving details of techniques are also scarce. Last group of problems and equally important is the dosimetric aspects of implants. At Smt. Vasantben R. Desai Cancer Research Centre, Rajkot we established interstitial brachy therapy services starting from the beginning. After attending a workshop in Feb. '86 at TMH, Bombay and subsequent short term training there, we started the preparation. We designed and fabricated almost all the radiation protection devices and other accessories locally at a cost of 50% or less. Some of these items have been supplied to a few other centers in India. Because of their unique features certain devices have been named GUPTA-MATHUR devices. This paper deals with comprehensive needs of the department, the kinds of problems faced while establishing this facility and their solutions. We feel establishing and running interstitial brachy therapy services using lr-192 wire is quite cost effective and is of great therapeutic benefit.