Design for manufacturability (DFM) is the process of proactively designing products to optimize its manufacturing functions so as to ensure the optimal lifecycle, quality, reliability, safety, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction. Prototyping is one of the most effective ways to ensure DFM by providing a model that serves to bring all areas of a company involved in producing and delivering a product to market to come together and work efficiently toward a common goal. Decisions made during this design phase will ultimately determine the cost of producing the product. This paper reports and discusses the concept of designing and modifying a part concurrently, and then further evaluating the design through prototyping to ensure that the part can be efficiently and effectively manufactured. The process describes the details of integration of CAD, Rapid Prototyping (RP), and CAM, which leads to the development of a process in which a part design and all necessary manufacture codes are generated and evaluated with the goal of streamlining its production. Subsequent geometry changes are made and evaluated by the integration of different softwares that capture part design and evaluate the manufacturing process until the part can be produced efficiently and economically. The case study results prove that RP-for-DFM is an efficient way of producing high quality automotive parts. This paper will discuss the RP-for-DFM integrated manufacturing practices investigated at Tennessee Tech.
