Book Image

3D Printing with Fusion 360

By : Sualp Ozel
Book Image

3D Printing with Fusion 360

By: Sualp Ozel

Overview of this book

As 3D printing gains traction, the demand for CAD experts in manufacturing grows. If you're a fan of Autodesk Fusion and crave hands-on experience with automated modeling, generative design, and the full potential of additive manufacturing, this book is your guide to elevating your design and 3D printing skills. In this book, you’ll learn how to open CAD or Mesh files in Fusion and expertly repair, edit, and prepare them for 3D printing. You’ll unlock the secrets of effective print preparation, learning about print settings, support structures, and part orientation. This book also highlights Fusion’s diverse preferences designed specifically for additive manufacturing. Subsequent chapters will guide you in choosing the right part orientation and position, as well as creating suitable support structures based on your chosen printing technology. You’ll simulate the printing process to detect and remedy common print failures associated with the metal powder bed fusion process. Finally, you’ll leverage templates and scripts to automate routine tasks around print preparation. By the end of this 3D printing book, you'll be armed with the knowledge and skills necessary to harness the power of Fusion for additive manufacturing, meeting the growing demand with confidence.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Design for Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) and Fusion 360
6
Part 2: Print Preparation – Creating an Additive Setup
10
Part 3: Print Preparation – Positioning Parts, Generating Supports, and Toolpaths
15
Part 4: Metal Printing, Process Simulation, and Automation

Recognizing CAD features and editing them

In the previous section, we briefly touched on the find features command, which is unique to direct modeling. In this section, we will dive a little deeper into this feature and highlight its strengths and shortcomings. We will also utilize this feature with an example dataset in order to edit a CAD file we import with DFAM principles in mind.

As 3D printing has become more mainstream, we need categories to refer to a certain group of 3D printers based on their category. At the time of writing, there are seven categories of additive manufacturing:

  • Material extrusion
  • VAT photopolymerization
  • Binder jetting
  • Material jetting
  • Powder bed fusion
  • Direct Energy deposition
  • Sheet lamination

There are multiple material extrusion methods, but probably the most common one is Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF). As some of the early patents for 3D printing started expiring after 2002, FFF technology has been going through...