The production of spare parts using Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an emerging area that impacts the supply chain management. To give designers a way to proceed at the moment of redesign and produce a spare part using AM, this contribution presents a methodology for the design and manufacturing of digital spare parts using AM in decentralized facilities. The re-design of the spare parts is tackled by giving design considerations based on agile hardware development practices to improve the quality of the spare parts and reduce the lead time. Since this methodology is derived from different case studies of the military over two years, the approach is suited for the defence industry but can be adapted to other industries that operate reduced facilities abroad. Additionally, three different use cases following the methodology are presented. The weaknesses of the processes are highlighted and some recommendations for production engineers and designers are given.

In military systems, usually the repair of deployed equipment can become impossible due to the lack of a spare, either due to logistical problems or because said component is no longer in production. Thus, arises the need to manufacture the spare in the place where the equipment needs it, this gives an interesting opportunity to implement the techniques of additive manufacturing in the field. In this article a case study of a required spare of the German Federal Armed Forces is presented, with a methodology to deal with the data in the integrated process of design and manufacturing.

The topic of support structure design in the Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) field is not addressed with the same relevance as the topic of part design. Therefore, this contribution investigates parameters for both the manufacturing and support structure design for the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) process. Matrices for cause-effect-relations of manufacturing and design parameters on build properties as well as correlations of them are presented. Based on these, recommendations for actions for experimental procedures are derived following the Design of Experiments method.