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Purpose The purpose of this study is the evaluation of advantages and criticalities related to the application of addtive manufacturing (AM) to the production of parts for musical instruments. A comparison between traditional manufacturing and AM based on different aspects is carried out. Design/methodology/approach A set of mouthpieces produced through different AM techniques has been designed, manufactured and evaluated using an end-user satisfaction-oriented approach. A musician has been tasked to play the same classical music piece with different mouthpieces, and the sound has been recorded in a recording studio. The mouthpiece and sound characteristics have been evaluated in a structured methodology. Findings The quality of the sound and comfort of 3D printed mouthpieces can be similar to the traditional ones provided that an accurate design and proper materials and technologies are adopted. When personalization and economic issues are considered, AM is superior to mouthpieces produced by traditional techniques. Research limitations/implications In this research, a mouthpiece for trombone has been investigated. However, a wider analysis where several musical instruments and related parts are evaluated could provide more data. Practical implications The production of mouthpieces with AM techniques is suggested owing to the advantages which can be tackled in terms of customization, manufacturing cost and time reduction. Originality/value This research is carried out using a multidisciplinary approach where several data have been considered to evaluate the end user satisfaction of 3D printed mouthpieces.

The topology optimization methodology is widely applied in industrial engineering to design lightweight and efficient components. Despite that, many techniques based on structural optimization return a digital model that is far from being directly manufactured, mainly because of surface noise given by spikes and peaks on the component. For this reason, mesh post-processing is needed. Surface smoothing is one of the numerical procedures that can be applied to a triangulated mesh file to return a more appealing geometry. In literature, there are many smoothing algorithms available, but especially those based on the modification of vertex position suffer from high mesh shrinkage and loss of important geometry features like holes and surface planarity. For these reasons, an improved vertex-based algorithm based on Vollmer’s surface smoothing has been developed and introduced in this work along with two case studies included to evaluate its performances compared with existent algorithms. The innovative approach herein developed contains some sub-routines to mitigate the issues of common algorithms, and confirms to be efficient and useful in a real-life industrial context. Thanks to the developed functions able to recognize the geometry feature to be frozen during the smoothing process, the user’s intervention is not required to guide the procedure to get proper results.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is becoming an important alternative to traditional processes. AM technology shows several advantages in literature, and its use increases in aerospace, automotive and biomedicine. Time reduction in design-to-manufacturing cycle, customization, capability to generate complex shapes in one piece and ability to imitate low-weight bio-inspired shapes are the strength of designs based on AM. Due to its potentials, major progresses were done in AM, thanks to technology evolution and increased computational power. With regard to AM, voxelization can be defined as part’s discretization in hexahedral elements, as done with pixels in 2D image. Voxels are used to speed-up geometry and algebraic manipulation thanks to their inherent advantages. This paper analyses advantages and criticalities of AM and voxel manipulation through a systematic literature review methodology. The analyses are based upon the filtering of a huge amount of publications available in literature up to obtaining the most significant 25 studies published in the last 5 years. The study’s main result is the technology gap’s identification, i.e. where AM and voxelization still need improvements, thus providing the reader with suggestions about possible further studies. Computer elaboration power and voxel discretization algorithms are suggested being key issues in AM’s further development.

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