Additive Manufacturing (AM): Processing Technique for Lightweight Alloys and Composite Material

Introduction

In this present economic time, cost reduction, time management and geometric complexity are major market demands in the development of new products. These are posing serious issues to the tooling processes that are already expensive and time consuming. Additive manufacturing (AM) and modern operational structures are effective tools that can assist to reduce time and cost (Ludovico et al., 2010). The quest for lightweight high performance structural metals by major industrial sectors such as the automobile, aerospace, energy and chemical have made researchers, engineers and other major stakeholders in the manufacturing sector to continuously develop different manufacturing techniques.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing has progressed into AM process with the ability of fabricating parts directly via layer-by-layer build-up process (Abdulrahman et al., 2018). Several companies have embraced Additive manufacturing technology because of its unique capabilities such as customization, multifunctionality, improvement in product reliability, high performance rate and overall production cost reduction. These companies include Siemens and other hearing aid manufacturers that use Stereolithography and sintering machines to produce hearing aid shells, Align Technology apply stereolithography to produce molds for production of dental braces, Boeing and its suppliers employed the selective laser sintering in the production of ducts and other similar components for fighter jet F-18 (Gibson et al., 2010a). AM technique is a progress made from rapid prototyping which is now employed in the production of end-use products that now find applications in different areas such as the automobile and aerospace industries (Wholer’s Report, 2016). AM processing technique produces components using 3D model data.

The main objective of the use of AM technique is to enhance the quality and performance of produced parts through cost of production, material usage and lead time (Kobryn et al., 2006). Some AM processes are undertaken with the use of lasers as the main source of energy to provide fast heating in melting the metal material thereby creating a melt pool with the capacity of enhancing diffusion rate of introduced metal powder to properly mix (Tlotleng et al., 2016).