A Review of Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace Application

In the era of Digital Manufacturing and supporting state-of-the-art, i.e. Additive manufacturing (AM) technology is getting more popular known as 3D printing, AM has created its own space in the fastest growing industry. 3D printing has evolved in previous years, and now, it is being used in several social life domains. The main application of this process has found in prototyping, aerospace industry, biomedical and dental implants. Additive manufacturing prints a part in a layer by layer or line by line pattern. It opposes the basic concept of traditional manufacturing. Advances in composite and multi-material manufacturing provide new opportunities for the convenient manufacture of lightweight parts and modern products, such as flapping wings, satellite brackets, and lightweight components for the aviation industry. It is a particular technology that varies from conventional and subtractive development in terms of lightweight, enhanced features, lower fuel consumption, and optimized machine performance, so on. This paper addressed the progress of AM in the aerospace field and addressed the issues of AM linked to a specific aerospace component.

Investigating the Reproducibility of the Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing Process

Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) of titanium parts shows promising potential for aerospace application due to its high deposition rates allowing a fast and economical production of large integral parts. However, due to the demands of aerospace industry an extensive qualification procedure is necessary to enable the parts as ready to fly. Nowadays, qualification for additive manufactured parts is a time-consuming process, so the advantages in additive manufacturing cannot be fully utilized. For this reason, a complete process qualification for WAAM would reduce the costs drastically in contrast to qualifying manufactured parts individually. As a first step the robustness and reproducibility of the energy reduced WAAM process was investigated. Thick-walled samples are manufactured layer by layer with an oscillating welding head motion. The mechanical properties of the samples are compared on an adequate statistical basis. Microstructural-and computer tomography analysis are conducted to comprehend shown interactions. The reproducibility is investigated in dependence of different heat treatment states, different directions of mechanical testing and two manufacturing systems of the same type.