Towards Additive Manufacture of Next Generation Prosthetics, Assessing Emerging CAD Strategies for Improving the Existing CAD Process

The research project that this work comes from aims to address the issues and inefficiencies of current CAD systems in regards to working on multiple scales, with a particular focus on improving prosthetic design. Working from the micron scale to the macro scale and following on from work that defined a criteria of necessary material properties, this paper is a continuation of previous work that attempts to answer the research question ‘How can new CAD strategies be applied to improve the efficiency of producing parts with these necessary material properties?’ A selection of emerging CAD strategies from the last five years have been selected with a view of improving the hybrid process order created in the previous study. Each of these processes is introduced, and their pros and cons compared before identifying the areas of the CAD criteria that they can improve efficiency. Testing was performed using the software if it is available to see areas of improvement first-hand.