Metal additive manufacturing in the commercial aviation industry: A review

Abstract

The applications of Additive Manufacturing (AM) have been grown up rapidly in various industries in the past few decades. Among them, aerospace has been attracted more attention due to heavy investment of the principal aviation companies for developing the AM industrial applications. However, many studies have been going on to make it more versatile and safer technology and require making development in novel materials, technologies, process design, and cost efficiency. As a matter of fact, AM has a great potential to make a revolution in the global parts manufacturing and distribution while offering less complexity, lower cost, and energy consumption, and very highly customization. The current paper aims to review the last updates on AM technologies, material issues, post-processes, and design aspects, particularly in the aviation industry. Moreover, the AM process is investigated economically including various cost models, spare part digitalization and environmental consequences. This review would be helpfully applied in both academia and industry as well.