Understanding additive manufacturing (AM) and exploiting successful design for AM (DfAM) practices requires 'hands-on' experience, according to Olaf Diegel, Professor of Additive Manufacturing at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Speaking on an episode of TCT's Additive Insight podcast about his work at the University's Creative Design and Additive Manufacturing Lab, Diegel talked about the need to 'get your hands dirty' in order to learn how and why design impacts the entire AM process.
"Additive is not a theoretical topic, it’s something you learn by doing," Diegel told TCT. "Once you’ve experienced the joy of support material removal and got bleeding hands from removing metal supports, you really understand the value of why you design to minimise supports."
Diegel, renowned for his work designing and building 3D printed guitars through his company ODD Guitars, is a big advocate for DfAM, and believes we're not 'not even close' to using it enough.
"I think this is one of the big things that's largely missing from the additive manufacturing world," Diegel explained. "Today I'd say still 90% of the companies that come to us to print parts for them, come up with blocks of steel, really boring traditional parts, and then they have a heart attack when we tell them what it's going cost to print the way they've designed it. So it’s a bit of vicious cycle because if they don't design the part right, it becomes too expensive, and because it's too expensive, they say 'oh additive manufacturing will never work. It won't do the job.' But once they start to design the right way, suddenly everything changes, you can start to make parts that are affordable, that add value to what you're doing. It changes the way they think about additive in a big way."
Diegel appeared on the podcast ahead of his upcoming keynote presentation at the Additive Manufacturing Users Group Conference, which will explore the value of DfAM, as part of a duo of keynote talks focused on creative adoption of 3D printing technologies. On the podcast, Diegel also discussed how that creative thinking complements the manufacturing and engineering fundamentals required by industry through his practical teaching at the lab.
"To me, anything that makes you think differently makes you come up with good ideas and innovation," Diegel said. "Ultimately, the goal of the lab is to educate industry and get them to think innovatively about additive manufacturing, how it can be used and creative ways to add value to their companies."
He also talked about 3D printing as a tool for collaboration between artists, designers, engineers, and scientists, suggesting that once you put a 3D printer in between them, it acts as a common language.
"I think, as engineers, we're taught to think boring through our education," Diegel said. "We're taught to think in a certain way [about] how we solve problems. We constantly think, ‘can I manufacture it with conventional technologies?’ and that really restricts us. To use a really bad stereotype, designers are the opposite way around, they don't think about whether it's possible or not. They just imagine it and then somehow create it and then leave it to the engineers to figure out 'how do we make this now?' But you can see how bringing those two worlds together, it broadens how they approach problems, how they solve them. I think there is a huge amount to learn between the two."
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Diegel will present 'Design for Additive Manufacturing: Understanding Value' on the AMUG 2024 main stage on Thursday 14th March. To attend, register for your AMUG Conference pass here.
