Additive manufacturing technology: the status, applications, and prospects

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has first emerged in 1987 with the invention of stereolithography. The AM is an important, rapidly emerging, manufacturing technology that takes the information from a computer-aided design (CAD) and builds parts in a layer-by-layer style. As this technology offers many advantages such as manufacturing of complex geometries, reducing manufacturing cost and energy consumption, it has transformed manufacturing from the mass production to the mass customization. Also, it has found wide applications in several fields although some drawbacks. This paper presents the state of the art of the different AM processes, the material processing issues, and the post-processing operations. A comparison between AM and conventional processes is presented as well. We finish by presenting some prospects of this technology such as hybrid manufacturing and 4D printing.

Plasmas for additive manufacturing

“…[ 8 ] Post‐processing can also be required for other materials such as polymers to modify the surface texture, degree of crosslinking, porosity, or residual stresses that ultimately affect the mechanical properties of the printed structure. [ 9 ] Most commonly, thermal treatment is the best choice; however, it is often the case that one or more of the device materials (including the substrate) is incompatible with heating and alternative approaches are required.…”

Tensile and Creep Properties Improvement of Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Specimens Produced by Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing

“…However, the high hardness and low machinability of Ti alloys affect their feasibility by conventional processes [3], encouraging the research for new methods, as pointed out in Reference [4], for vibration cutting. Machinability problems can be overcome by additive manufacturing, that includes a variety of technologies, applied for more than 20 years for porous structures and prototypes, some of which promise to become commonly used to produce near-net-shape components of complex geometry reducing production time and cost [5].…”

A dynamic order acceptance and scheduling approach for additive manufacturing on-demand production

“…As an emerging disruptive manufacturing technology, the application of AM technologies has increased substantially in different industries during the past years, and considerable research, from scientific and technological challenges [3,5,7] to business model innovation and industry application issues [2,4,[16][17][18], has been carried out. A prediction of the future of AM, based on an extensive Delphi survey by Jiang et al [1], indicated that, by 2030, a significant number of small and medium enterprises will share industry-specific additive manufacturing production resources to achieve higher machine utilization, learning effects, and quality assessments.…”

“…This characteristic of AM provides new opportunities for freedom of design and enables on-demand production of customized products without additional manufacturing costs due to the geometric complexity. The importance of AM technology has been recognized in various businesses [1,2,4,5] and has been considered as one of the key supporting technologies for smart design and manufacturing in Industry 4.0 [6]. The advantages of AM technology over traditional manufacturing have been identified and discussed by Attaran [7].…”

“…Two of the most representative AM processes, Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM), classified as the Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) process, have received significant attention in the research and have been widely adopted in various industries due to their advantages in producing fine-resolution and high-quality near-full-density parts [3,5]. PBF is an AM process, in which thermal energy source, either a laser or electron beam, is used to melt and fuse selective regions of a powder bed (ASTM:F2790-12a).…”