Additive Manufacturing in the Smart Factory: Challenges and Opportunities for Producibility, Enhanced Performance, and Sustainability in Aerospace

Additive Manufacturing is an emerging technology that has the potential to significantly disrupt the Aerospace industry by creating innovative design solutions to difficult engineering problems. Benefits that drive Additive Manufacturing implementation include: increased vehicle performance due to novel part designs achievable only with additive manufacturing; reduced cost and schedule; and enhanced producibility and sustainability trades. A key prerequisite to onboarding additive manufacturing onto flight vehicles is demonstration of repeatable and reliable performance. This talk will discuss research aimed at achieving repeatable and reliable material characteristics and dimensional stability. Further, because Additive Manufacturing is a digital process, the end-to-end value stream can be readily integrated into the digital thread, where extracted data from each process in the value stream is archived in a cloud-based repository that is easily accessible for the creation of data driven models and machine learning algorithms that provide continuous improvement feedback, enhanced insight into the process, and drive scale and quality.