Review: The Impact of Metal Additive Manufacturing on the Aerospace Industry

Metal additive manufacturing (AM) has matured from its infancy in the research stage to the fabrication of a wide range of commercial functional applications. In particular, at present, metal AM is now popular in the aerospace industry to build and repair various components for commercial and military aircraft, as well as outer space vehicles. Firstly, this review describes the categories of AM technologies that are commonly used to fabricate metallic parts. Then, the evolution of metal AM used in the aerospace industry from just prototyping to the manufacturing of propulsion systems and structural components is also highlighted. In addition, current outstanding issues that prevent metal AM from entering mass production in the aerospace industry are discussed, including the development of standards and qualifications, sustainability, and supply chain development.

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Decision methods application to compare conventional manufacturing process with metal additive manufacturing process in the aerospace industry

Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering ◽

10.1007/s40430-016-0532-8 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 39 (1) ◽

pp. 177-193 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Marcio Fernando Cruz ◽

Anderson Vicente Borille

Keyword(s):

Additive Manufacturing ◽

Manufacturing Process ◽

Aerospace Industry ◽

Metal Additive Manufacturing ◽

Decision Methods ◽

Metal Additive

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Metal Additive Manufacturing Parts Inspection Using Convolutional Neural Network

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app10020545 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 545 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Wenyuan Cui ◽

Yunlu Zhang ◽

Xinchang Zhang ◽

Lan Li ◽

Frank Liou

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Additive Manufacturing ◽

Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Data Augmentation ◽

Quality Inspection ◽

Weight Decay ◽

Metal Additive Manufacturing ◽

Low Efficiency ◽

The Impact ◽

Metal Additive

Metal additive manufacturing (AM) is gaining increasing attention from academia and industry due to its unique advantages compared to the traditional manufacturing process. Parts quality inspection is playing a crucial role in the AM industry, which can be adopted for product improvement. However, the traditional inspection process has relied on manual recognition, which could suffer from low efficiency and potential bias. This study presented a convolutional neural network (CNN) approach toward robust AM quality inspection, such as good quality, crack, gas porosity, and lack of fusion. To obtain the appropriate model, experiments were performed on a series of architectures. Moreover, data augmentation was adopted to deal with data scarcity. L2 regularization (weight decay) and dropout were applied to avoid overfitting. The impact of each strategy was evaluated. The final CNN model achieved an accuracy of 92.1%, and it took 8.01 milliseconds to recognize one image. The CNN model presented here can help in automatic defect recognition in the AM industry.

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COMPARING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF METAL ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TO CONVENTIONAL MANUFACTURING

Proceedings of the Design Society ◽

10.1017/pds.2021.67 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 ◽

pp. 671-680

Author(s):

Corrie Van Sice ◽

Jeremy Faludi

Keyword(s):

Additive Manufacturing ◽

Fuel Efficiency ◽

Aerospace Industry ◽

Wire Drawing ◽

The Other ◽

Future Studies ◽

Metal Additive Manufacturing ◽

Use Phase ◽

Design Freedom ◽

Metal Additive

AbstractMetal additive manufacturing (AM) is revered for the design freedom it brings, but is it environmentally better or worse than conventional manufacturing? Since few direct comparisons are published, this study compared AM data from life-cycle assessment literature to conventional manufacturing data from the Granta EduPack database. The comparison included multiple printing technologies for steel, aluminum, and titanium. Results showed that metal AM had far higher CO2 footprints per kg of material processed than casting, extrusion, rolling, forging, and wire drawing, so it is usually a less sustainable choice than these. However, there were circumstances where it was a more sustainable choice, and there was significant overlap between these circumstances and aerospace industry use of metal AM. Notably, lightweight parts reducing embodied material impacts, and reducing use-phase impacts through fuel efficiency. Finally, one key finding was the irrelevance of comparing machining to AM per kg of material processed, since one is subtractive and the other is additive. Recommendations are given for future studies to use more relevant functional units to provide better comparisons.

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Beamless Metal Additive Manufacturing

Materials ◽

10.3390/ma13040922 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 922 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mohammad Vaezi ◽

Philipp Drescher ◽

Hermann Seitz

Keyword(s):

Additive Manufacturing ◽

Selective Laser Sintering ◽

Metal Powders ◽

Metal Additive Manufacturing ◽

Wide Range ◽

Anisotropic Mechanical Properties ◽

High Production ◽

High Production Cost ◽

Am Processes ◽

Metal Additive

The propensity to manufacture functional and geometrically sophisticated parts from a wide range of metals provides the metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes superior advantages over traditional methods. The field of metal AM is currently dominated by beam-based technologies such as selective laser sintering (SLM) or electron beam melting (EBM) which have some limitations such as high production cost, residual stress and anisotropic mechanical properties induced by melting of metal powders followed by rapid solidification. So, there exist a significant gap between industrial production requirements and the qualities offered by well-established beam-based AM technologies. Therefore, beamless metal AM techniques (known as non-beam metal AM) have gained increasing attention in recent years as they have been found to be able to fill the gap and bring new possibilities. There exist a number of beamless processes with distinctively various characteristics that are either under development or already available on the market. Since this is a very promising field and there is currently no high-quality review on this topic yet, this paper aims to review the key beamless processes and their latest developments.

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An Investigation of the Metal Additive Manufacturing Issues and Perspective for Solutions Approach

Concepts, Applications and Emerging Opportunities in Industrial Engineering ◽

10.5772/intechopen.93630 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Omar Ahmed Al-Shebeeb

Keyword(s):

Additive Manufacturing ◽

Product Quality ◽

Complex Geometry ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Design For Additive Manufacturing ◽

Potential Approach ◽

Metal Additive Manufacturing ◽

Metallic Parts ◽

Metal Additive

Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) is delivering a new revolution in producing three-dimensional parts from metal-based material. MAM can fabricate metallic parts with complex geometry. However, this type of Additive Manufacturing (AM) is also impacted by several issues, challenges, and defects, which influence product quality and process sustainability. In this chapter, a review has been made on the types of small to medium-sized metallic parts currently manufactured using the MAM method. Then, investigation was undertaken to analyze the defects, challenges, and issues inherent to the design for additive manufacturing, by using MAM method. MAM-related obstacles are discussed in depth in this chapter and these obstacles occur in all size of metal printed parts. The reasons and solutions presented by previous researchers of these obstacles are discussed as well. A potential approach based on the author’s knowledge and analysis for solving these issues and challenges is suggested in this chapter. Based on the author’s conclusion, the MAM is not limited by part size, material, or geometry. In order to validate the potential solutions developed by the author of this work, performing actual MAM process is required and a local visit to manufacturing factories are also important to visualize these challenges and issues.

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