attitude, responsibility, business, corporate social responsibility, gender, business education, socialization, Finland,

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PurposeAlthough additive manufacturing (AM) has been demonstrated to have significant potential in improving spare part delivery operations and has been adopted to a degree in the aviation and automotive industries, its use in spare part production is still limited in other fields due to a variety of implementation barriers. The purpose of this article is to assess the significance of previously reported barriers in the context of the machine-building industry.Design/methodology/approachAdoption barriers are identified from the literature and formulated as hypotheses, which are verified with a set of focus group interviews consisting of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), AM service providers and quality inspection and insurance institutions. The results of the interviews are reported qualitatively, and the transcripts of the interviews are subjected to quantitative content analysis.FindingsThe article identifies distrust in quality, insufficient material and design knowledge among stakeholders and poor availability of design documentation on spare parts as the key barriers of adopting AM in the production of spare parts. The three key barriers are interconnected and training engineers to be proficient in design and material issues as well as producing high-quality design documentation will yield the highest increase in AM implementation in spare parts.Originality/valueThe article offers a unique approach as it investigates the subjective views of a cross-organizational group of industrial actors involved in the machine-building industry. The article contributes to the theory of digital spare parts by verifying and rejecting presented barriers of AM implementation and how they are interconnected.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has during the 21st century gradually shifted from prototyping towards the manufacture of end-use quality parts. The drivers to utilize AM instead of conventional manufacturing methods are often linked to geometrical design freedom, increased performance, customization, part consolidation, and weight reduction. However, designers have struggled to take full advantage of these new capabilities. In part, this is due to a pervasive engineering mindset locked into the constraints of conventional manufacturing technologies. Another reason is the lack of efficient design methodologies that would take into account the new capabilities of AM. In this paper, to address the latter deficiency, an assembly redesign process for AM is deconstructed and analyzed. The studied assembly is an elevator accessibility button, which is a high-mix low-volume product. From the industry perspective, AM could reduce costs and increase the agility of production. Through systematic requirements mapping, part- and product-level functional analysis, a holistic functional analysis of the product is composed. The results of the product functional analysis are illustrated in a visual 3D design space. The 3D illustration is suggested as a conceptualization tool for the designers and as a way to reinforce creativity in the design process. The usability and expandability of the tool are discussed and contrasted with the current design methodologies for AM.

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Additive manufacturing enables product designers to incorporate complexity onto their designs on multiple size scales. Computer-aided design methods, such as topology optimization and lattice design, have emerged as software tools for applications where part consolidation and weight reduction are desired. Still, a more delicate control of hierarchical complexity and submillimeter-sized features would unlock a widely unexplored frontier of new design possibilities. However, the complexity of a design can respectively affect the manufacturing process. In powder bed fusion, the diameter, power and speed of the laser spot and the resulting size of the melt pool define the attainable feature resolution and accuracy in comparison with the original design intent. X-ray computed tomography can be a useful tool in validation and provide a detailed, volumetric representation of a part with internal features. This paper examines the design accuracy of 316L metal lattice structures and density of solid cubes with industrial X-ray micro-computed tomography. Accessible tools with open source software are presented for CT data analysis. The nominal values are compared against the as-built and CT scanned samples for surface area, volume, and dimensional accuracy. A CT voxel size of 30–40 μm allows to identify printability issues and general trends in the part density in comparison to the geometry changes. However, a finer voxel size in the submicron range would be required to properly detect and localize internal porosity and evaluate surface topography.

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