| Rapid manufacturing is a manufacturing processes of which the market is in rapid growth. This process presents revolutionary fabrication possibilities, such as the possibility to create complex shapes and multi-material parts. Furthermore, with traditional manufacturing process which function by materiel removal, the most important factor influencing the cost of a part is the complexity. With rapid manufacturing the manufacturing cost is influenced primarily by the volume of the piece, adding complexity is therefore not a problem.;Older methodologies help the designer to create pieces that are easy to manufacture using traditional manufacturing processes and thus to diminish the manufacturing cost, although none of these methodologies are applicable to rapid manufacturing. With rapid manufacturing it is preferable to guide the designer into adding complexity in order to improve the product.;This thesis has for goal to develop a methodology which aims at helping the designer to bring ameliorations to his product and also to incorporate the advantages of rapid manufacturing in the product, which doesn't exist in the actual literature. To do so, an analysis of the different design methodologies and of methodologies related to rapid manufacturing is done in order to determine if some of the approaches used by these methodologies are also applicable to rapid manufacturing.;Further on, from these observations a methodology adapted specifically for rapid manufacturing is presented. The proposed methodology guides the designer to conceive in terms of optimal solutions instead of in terms of limitation and to implement in parallel solutions to consolidate the assembly, prevent failures in the assembly and to optimize the assembly towards a user-defined goal.;In order to verify that the methodology works properly it is applied to a mechanical assembly that has to answer to certain criteria and of which we want to optimize the weight. By following the proposed methodology, various ameliorations are brought to the product and the weight was significantly optimized while answering to the predefined criteria.;However, there are issues with the numerical chain with regards to being able to take into account the multi-material aspect of parts. The data transfer formats, which capable of taking into account this aspect, aren't fully implemented and thus do not save this information. The Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Engineering software don't let the user properly design multi-material parts and do not ingrate algorithms which would permit to optimize material distribution within a part. |
