Authors: Miao Linhao, Aini Zuhra Abdul Kadir, Nurul Husna Mohd Yusoff, Yusri Yusof, Kamran Latif, Gunawan Setia, Chandrawati Putri Wulandari
Additive manufacturing, commonly referred to as 3D printing, gives designers new freedom, but the design guideline available today is scattered and often hard to access accurately. This makes it difficult, especially for novice designers, to know which design principle fits a practical design problem. This paper addresses this by combining design for additive manufacturing with TRIZ, a structured problem-solving method, to build a new TRIZ-AM contradiction matrix. The matrix links common design conflicts in additive manufacturing to practical design principles, helping users move from a problem to possible solutions more systematically. We developed AM-specific engineering parameters and design principles, then validated the method with experts and user studies. Compared with using conventional additive manufacturing design principles alone, the TRIZ-AM approach helped participants generate more design concepts and substantially reduced the number of redesign iterations. Overall, the study shows that a structured and application-oriented design-support tool can support more creative and efficient design for additive manufacturing.
Fig. 1 TRIZ-AM Contradiction Matrix Construction and Use Example
Can a helmet be lighter without being less protective? Can a phone stay cooler without becoming bulkier? Can bone implant with a patient’s specific geometry be easily manufactured? We propose a TRIZ-AM contradiction matrix to guide these design trade-offs.