AIMS – A Metal Additive-hybrid Manufacturing System: System Architecture and Attributes

This paper presents an integrated hybrid manufacturing approach to enhance and accelerate the adoption of metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) by adding a direct digital subtractive process to the production that is capable of improving the form, location and position tolerance of critical part features as well as improving surface finish. The hybrid system, AIMS (Additive systems Integrated with subtractive MethodS) can be integrated with existing metal AM systems without any significant modifications. The intent of this paper is to: 1) detail the system architecture, 2) highlight the process requirements, and 3) illustrate the sequential functions from development of CAD models through AM processing, to subtractive post-processing and corresponding process monitoring. Attributes of individual components such as physical and computational requirements associated with each discrete step of the overall process is presented. Advantages and current limitations of AIMS are also noted. The developed models provide insight into how the overall process-flow could be affected by errors (variability) due to both physical and data transfer across multiple systems. This paper also presents a generalized use of AIMS-for a variety of part geometries, noting materials and processing efficiencies associated with this unique hybrid method.