ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING: CHALLENGES TO FACE

CALL FOR PAPERS

Additive Manufacturing: Challenges to face

The last few years have seen accelerated growth and adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) by several measures, most notably in industrial adoption and implementation for materials intensive applications. Sales of AM systems for manufacturing metal parts grew at a year-on-year rate of about 47% for the most recent data available (Wohlers report 2016). This is reflective of greater interest and acceptance of the industrial manufacturing community for AM as a standard technique. This acceptance is the product of 25 years of intensive research and development. The first papers on powder bed fusion AM for metals were published in 1993. A comparison between these early papers and the recently published work documenting the properties of parts in titanium or nickel alloys produced using commercially available powders and equipment shows the progress that the material processing community has driven and which serves as the foundation for accelerating growth in applications. Nevertheless, despite all this euphoria that surrounds this technology, several technical or economic barriers still limit its expansion.

The presentation will highlight some of the major current barriers, as powder costs, low build rate with the available equipment, lack of NDT methods for the finished parts and limited historical data slowing qualification and certification processes. Some ideas and proposals to address these challenges are documented evaluated. The scope of the presentation includes both Additive Manufacturing technologies, i.e. “deposition” (High Deposition Rate, HDR technology, using wire as feedstock) and “powder bed” (using spherical powder as feedstock) and is focussed on titanium alloys, including titanium aluminides.