Stéphane Danjou

Challenges for Design Management

AbstractThe globalization of the markets, increasing complexity and diversification of products as well as product and process innovations as central factors of business competition have forced companies to create new strategies of product development. This article examines how today’s companies have brought forth the necessary technical preconditions in the CAD environment for the application of virtual simulation and verification techniques. In addition to evaluation of contemporary techniques, the article is devoted to possible causes of missing basic conditions. These remarks will be concluded with prospects in future challenges of the product development.

Improving part quality and process efficiency in layered manufacturing by adaptive slicing

The characteristic of layered manufacturing is the incremental build-up which inevitably leads to the staircase effect. One method to reduce this effect is to optimise part orientation and to apply adaptive slicing procedures. Although layer thickness will be decreased in some regions, process efficiency can be kept to a reasonable level. This paper presents different approaches of adaptive slicing for laser-based applications in consideration of limited range of thickness variation to ensure the mechanical part properties. In contradiction to previous work, the number of applied layer thicknesses is limited due to the associated process parameters. In order to optimise the slicing process and to obtain the best results, this paper presents a practicable approach based on existing work to simulate adaptive slicing. To underline the potential of non-uniform slicing, illustrative examples will show possible improvements in the case of replacing the uniform slicing procedure.