Jonathan Meyer, Airbus Group Innovations’ HO additive manufacturing recently presented his company’s roadmap to additive manufacturing at this year’s IN(3D)USTRY – From Needs to Solutions.
Airbus’ History with AM
To know where a technology is heading, it helps to know where it’s already been.
“The first use of stereolithography in Airbus wind tunnel models was back in 1996,” said Meyer. “We applied polymers for the first time on serial products—in helicopters—back in 2003. We then went a bit broader and started applying SLS [selective laser sintering] in tooling applications.”
In 2007, Airbus started looking seriously at metal additive manufacturing. In 2011, the company began using EBM titanium structural components on its satellites. “Satellites are our first push in being adventurous [with a new technology],” said Meyer.
Airbus deployed its first certified titanium parts for civil aircraft just this year. “Those parts are not topology optimized,” said Meyer. “They’re really a direct substitution of parts, but there is a business case there: it’s about reoccurring costs. Those particular parts have a very poor buy-to-fly ratio, therefore we can see a cost saving, but it’s a niche; it’s not the end goal.”
The Value Proposition of Additive Manufacturing
So, what is Airbus’ end goal when it comes to additive manufacturing?
To answer that question, we need to consider how Airbus sees the technology as a value proposition. Meyer outlined numerous ways in which additive manufacturing can be valuable to a company, broadly categorized in terms of product cost, development time and cost and performance.
“Normally,” said Meyer, “when we think of near net shape products, we think of tooling, long lead times and high, non-reoccurring costs upfront, so we label that material cost saving downstream. With an additive process, we’re taking a lot of the tooling out of the equation. That gives us potential advantages in the future. We have reduced cycle time for iterations during development, reduced time for the first product from the design definition and taking the tooling away is really what gives you design freedom.”
Regarding some of the more exciting but less established features of additive manufacturing, Meyer noted that, “To date, we’ve been working with old materials using a new process, and there are few examples where people have really pushed the boundary on that, but it can really be a performance enabler, particularly in high-temperature environments.”
“The one that’s not been accessed very much yet,” Meyer continued, “because it presents a huge number of challenges around the perimeter, is spatially graded materials: the ability to use directed energy deposition to vary your material. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic change—we’re not talking about big chemistry changes, because that can lead you into a whole world of problems—but even quite subtle changes to the microstructure can have quite big optimization potential in terms of the performance of a product.”
Value-Driven Applications for Additive Manufacturing
Meyer suggested that the overall value of additive manufacturing can be understood in three ways:
- Agile Manufacturing
- Optimized Parts
- More Integrated Architecture
Each of these benefits is dependent on certain key enablers.
“Process qualification is very important as well,” Meyer added. “If we have to perform a specific qualification on every part, that’s punishing us on lead time. We could have a much broader scope of applications with a solid process qualification.”
Regarding part optimization, Meyer emphasized the need for more robust design for manufacturing tools to deal with the complex designs characteristic of additive manufacturing. “How will we surface finish this part with inaccessible surfaces?” he asked, rhetorically. “How will we address support removal on this part?”
“Today,” Meyer explained, “there’s no one surface finishing process that can address all the different geometries that we face; we have some that are excellent for cleaning out channels, but not very good for external surface finishing, and vice versa.”
Finally, in order to achieve more integrated architectures, additive manufacturing needs to see advancements in intermediate processing. “You generate problems for yourself in terms of areas that are impossible to access for your post-processing steps,” said Meyer. “And so, you may need to consider a process in which your part is produced in loops, including post-processing steps. That brings up additional challenges, but unless we start looking at them, we’re never going to get there.”
Additive Manufacturing in Aerospace - Looking Forward
The path forward for Airbus seems to be based around the idea of unlocking the three benefits cited above via their key enablers. Meyer explained his company’s next steps as follows:
“Today, we’re targeting spares, niche serial parts where we can see a business case; it’s really around ISO design. In the very near future, we’re targeting topology optimized parts for higher volume applications, like civil aircraft. Looking farther forward, we’re investigating higher deposition rate processes, initially looking at blanks. We’re not focusing on design freedom, but in the longer term, we are looking at taking advantage of the third dimension, which has typically constrained designers to date.”
Are you considering integrating metal additive manufacturing into your operation?