If you took apart a brand new aircraft piece by piece, you’d likely find numerous items created through additive manufacturing: cabin parts, engine components, air ducting, brackets, and many more. Manufacturers already use 3D printing and various types of additive manufacturing (AM) to expedite the design and build process — even if they’re not yet using it to make critical mechanical parts or key aerospace structural components.

The significant upside offered by additive manufacturing in aerospace means that aircraft manufacturers will soon use it to build these components from the ground up. For one, 3D-printed parts weigh less thanks to opportunities to condense multiple parts into one composite object. Plus, a 3D-printed part can have a similar yield and ultimate strength as a conventionally produced part due to AM’s ability to work with high-performance materials like titanium efficiently. The applications are almost endless thanks to the rapid evolution of additive manufacturing technologies.

As that evolution continues, it promises to revolutionize how aerospace manufacturers operate. To get a sense of what the future holds, let’s consider one major advancement coming down the pipeline and the obstacles it still needs to clear.

3D Printing at Aerospace Scale

The size of 3D-printed parts is limited by the size of the printers themselves. Build chambers are growing steadily, which opens up the potential to print larger aircraft parts or to print more parts at the same time. Size and scale were among the biggest challenges facing additive manufacturing in aerospace, but they don’t appear insurmountable.

That being said, printing on a bigger scale — in terms of size or speed — comes with its own issues. For instance, longer and thicker parts will cool at different rates, resulting in varying material microstructures from location to location. Manufacturers must account for this difference when attempting to certify a part for both ultimate strength (proof testing) and cyclic strength (fatigue testing).

Quality control and consistency are problematic in other ways, too. Multiple parts built within the same build cycle (e.g., nested parts) have complex interactions with the build chamber environment (e.g., gas flow, cooling rates, additional material deposition, etc.). This could create variability between these parts that would need to be quantified during certification.

It will take time before build chambers become massive and produce perfectly consistent parts, but it will be less time than many people expect. Boeing already uses a titanium structural component produced on an additive manufacturing platform, suggesting certain parts can already meet the industry’s exacting standards. And many more manufacturers will soon follow suit thanks to forthcoming technological breakthroughs.

Put yourself at the vanguard of the aerospace industry by exploring the right (and wrong) ways to implement additive manufacturing. Let VEXTEC be your guide.