The aviation industry is evolving and opting for new manufacturing methods, welding, and more. Aviation welding plays an important role in repairing and rejoining metal parts of an aircraft. On the other hand, additive manufacturing plays a crucial role in manufacturing complex aircraft parts with more precision.
Additive manufacturing has created some real buzz in recent years if we talk about the manufacturing process of the aviation industry. It has smoothened out manufacturing operations and made building complex parts much easier. Especially in the past five years, additive manufacturing has taken a lot of column space as it has changed the arrow space sector.
However, every process comes with its own challenges, and because of being in the early stage of adoption, there are different financial and technical challenges of additive manufacturing.
This blog post will highlight the important and most common challenges of additive manufacturing in the aviation industry.
What Is Additive Manufacturing?
If you are a newbie and do not know about additive manufacturing, this blog post might help you. Additive manufacturing, also known as additive layer manufacturing, is the industrial production name for 3D printing. It helps create 3-dimensional objects by deposition of materials, usually in layers. This process includes building the products layer by layer, in contrast to traditional manufacturing, which often requires machining and other techniques.
The additive manufacturing process includes binder jetting, direct energy deposition, material extrusion, powder bed fusion, sheet lamination, vat polymerization, etc. These all are distinct additive manufacturing processes with their own standards that we will not go into detail in this blog post.
Challenges Of Additive Manufacturing
Some of the common challenges of additive manufacturing in the aviation industry are as follows:
Quality Consistency
One of the basic requirements in the aviation industry is quality and making sure that everything is manufactured up to the standards. If a particular part being manufactured is not up to the requirements and standards, it might pose a serious threat to the aircraft.
Right now, additive manufacturing has problems with regard to quality consistency, especially while producing fully dense metal parts. Currently, the additive manufacturing systems can only offer about 30 to 40 microns accuracy.
This makes it quite alarming and a big challenge for additive manufacturing in aviation. When the parts don't align with the quality tolerance level, such parts will require additional work after they have been printed with additive manufacturing. Therefore, this can mark the efficiency of the additive manufacturing process as a whole.
Limitations In Sizes
Another common challenge of additive manufacturing in the aviation industry is its inability to manufacture odd-sized and large parts. Many times, it has been noted that additive manufacturing underperformed compared to traditional manufacturing when it came to the production of large aircraft components and parts.
This means that additive manufacturing has a long way to go if it has to create bigger aviation components, and thus, aircraft companies might have to rely on joining different parts together using different welding processes or other options.
Limited Range Of Materials And High Cost
Right now, attitude manufacturing only uses a small group of polymers and metal powder to produce aircraft parts in the aviation industry. Such materials are quite costly. Moreover, such materials have higher price tags than the materials used in traditional manufacturing.
Limitations In Scalability
Additive manufacturing systems cannot scale up production in case of a sudden increase in demand. On the other hand, traditional manufacturing processes can stock a very large inventory to deal with unforeseen events. This can create the issue of scalability and production, where additive manufacturing might not be able to support the mass production needs of the aviation industry.
Final Thoughts
Although the new methods can provide efficiency and ease in creating aviation parts, still, they have a long way to go to achieve maximum efficiency. In this scenario, aviation welding plays an important role in the manufacturing and repairing of aviation parts of any scale and size.
About Acorn Welding
Get quality aviation parts from us. Acorn Welding is serving customers around the world. We are Canada's largest aircraft exhaust and engine mounts repair company and the world's largest radial and vintage aircraft exhaust repair company. Contact us for more information.
