Simulation Driven Design and Additive Manufacturing. A new design process to unleash potential of Additive Manufacturing freedom

Additive Manufacturing has become sufficiently mature in which is absolutely necessary to make use of the benefits that it provides. In the past, engineering design was limited due to manufacturing constrains and design tools. Now a day, the scenario is completely different. By combining the benefits of design freedom from Additive Manufacturing and Optimization driven design, we can open the gates of a whole new structural design method through a process that involves conceptual (topology) optimization, abstraction and application of design principles in geometry creation, detailed (shape) optimization and design validation. Together, this method offers the best practices to design incredibly light, strong and efficient structures, exploiting the creativity and design freedom in a short period of time using efficient software tools. There are still challenges and questions that come into the application of this method, such as: new design principles taking into account manufacturing constrains from Additive Manufacturing and design validation.