Design-to-Print Philosophy Development Focused on Economical Efficiency

STELIA Aerospace designs and produces aerostructures, pilot seats and business/first class passenger seats. These activities can benefit from additive manufacturing with appropriate design: nowadays, AM often rhymes with strong optimization to find top mass performance ratio through organic designs. Economically speaking, this can lead to a non-sense as it overlooks manufacturing aspects.

In this work, implementation of production goals is achieve to define the most economically efficient design of a Pilot seat armrest: From an initial assembly of multiple parts with different manufacturing processes and materials, powder bed fusion offers the opportunity of a single part design. A focus is set on part functionalization, topological optimization considering printing steps, and finally, parts orientation, printing parameters and nesting optimization of the batch to improve productivity.

Then, this engineering philosophy has been validated with printing tests of full batches of parts. Finally, abuse loads tests on the armrests has permitted to check material and performances.

As a conclusion, the result of all these steps is the development of a specific Design-to-Print philosophy in accordance with AM industrial performance. Weight savings is confirmed by these new design and process, and reaching the target costs could lead to potential production.