A review of integrated approaches for material, design and process selection and a proposal for the AM processes

The comprehensive approach to the development of a product should analysis all of the phases, from the design to the manufacturing for the selection of a good combination of materials, designs and manufacturing processes. Due to the complexity of addressing an all-inclusive problem, the decision is usually entrusted to the manufacturing engineers for which products that have producible features easily and simple geometries are desirable, even if sacrificing the component performances. However, today, Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes offer a wide degree of design freedom that allows overcoming the traditional manufacturing limitations. The aim of this paper is to provide a thorough review of the process selection (PS) approaches by taking into account manufacturing technologies in conjunction with the material and design performance. The paper attempts to provide as result a basic and generic methodology, which provides guidelines for the effective introduction of the AM processes in the process selection problem