A Comprehensive Review on the Application of 3D Printing in the Aerospace Industry

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is a process wherein a three-dimensional object is created layer-by-layer. It offers adaptability to the geometrical complexity and customizability of the design, which is difficult to manufacture using conventional manufacturing. The aerospace industry is one of the sectors that first adopted additive manufacturing, particularly three-dimensional printing (3D printing) in the production of aircraft parts such as rocket engine components, oil fuel tanks, environmental control system ducting, combustor liner, custom cosmetic aircraft interior components, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) components. The aircraft's most common materials used in the 3D printing prototype parts are acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) thermoplastic, carbon-fiber and thermoplastic composite, and nylon 12 using selective laser sintering, fused deposition modeling, or composite filament co-extrusion technology. One of the aerospace industry's challenges is ensuring the efficiency and quality of aircraft structural parts that typically require complicated manufacturing due to their complexity and variability of function. Additive manufacturing is seen to respond to this challenge by developing and prototyping 3D printed parts and exploring practical 3D printing technologies.

The Three-Dimensional Printing of Composites: A Review of the Finite Element/Finite Volume Modelling of the Process

“…Eventually, beginning from 1999 (EOS GmbH, Krailling, Germany), the metallic powders (titanium, aluminum, stainless steel, nickel-based alloys) were melted and welded together via guided lasers or electron beam fluxes under the generically named powder bed fusion (PBF), in particular selective laser melting (SLM-1999) or electron beam melting (EBM-2000), considering the energy source [10,11]. In the beginning, the additive manufacturing technologies satisfied the industrial needs of rapid prototyping, serving as design studies, mock-ups, rapid tooling for molds, and, eventually, fully functional components in sectors such as aerospace (fuel tanks, fuselage, or interior elements) [12,13], automotive (body panels, interior elements, or spare parts) [14,15], medical applications (prosthetics, dental, or bone implants) [16,17], or electronics (MEMS, LED, transistors, or batteries) [18,19]. The global market of additive manufacturing has an estimated annual growth of 18.41% from 2023 to 2032, and the market share has risen from 13.16 billion dollars (2022) to 109.52 billion dollars (2032) [20][21][22].…”

“…Short fibered structures present improved mechanical characteristics than pure plastics, due to the reinforcement embedded into the component, as noticed in Figure 1b [41][42][43][44]. [12,13], automotive (body panels, interior elements, or spare parts) [14,15], medica cations (prosthetics, dental, or bone implants) [16,17], or electronics (MEMS, LED, tors, or batteries) [18,19]. The global market of additive manufacturing has an es annual growth of 18.41% from 2023 to 2032, and the market share has risen fro billion dollars (2022) to 109.52 billion dollars (2032) [20][21][22].…”

Effect of laser power on microstructure and mechanical properties of selective laser melted AlSi10Mg alloy

“…In addition, the rapid scanning of the laser beam leads to the formation of a high cooling rate and a large temperature gradient in the molten pool, which inhibits the alloying element segregation and grain coarsening, and is conducive to improving the mechanical properties of metal parts. Selective laser melting technology has been widely used in aerospace, automobile industry, biomedicine, and other fields [4,5] .…”

Designing aerodynamic devices for UAV – lessons learned

“…It also covers design and manufacturing of the lip and inlet duct for the miniature jet engine, as well as the design of the small size pressure port manufactured with the use of the 3D printing additive technology. 3D printing is becoming more widely adopted in aerospace (Mieloszyk et al , 2019; Martinez et al , 2022; Karkun and Dharmalingam, 2022; Skawiński and Goetzendorf-Grabowski, 2019), recently even with the support of the manufacturing process with artificial intelligence (Syuhada et al , 2021). All the mentioned devices showed interesting challenges to overcome.…”