Читать книгу Metal Additive Manufacturing - Ehsan Toyserkani - Страница 20

AM is on the path to offer disruptive solutions for mass customization, digital fabrication, and decentralized manufacturing as required by the current industrial revolution as a technology for rapid production of prototypes and evolving to reliable techniques for fabrication of customized, low‐volume parts we are in known as Industry 4.0. Machine developers are trying to achieve this goal by improving process throughput, build volume, process control, and available raw materials. As more and more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and service enterprises start to adopt AM, this transition speeds up. Due to this active progress in the AM industry, the following statement is well received as it reads, “AM is a disruptive technology that is disrupting itself regularly.”

Figure 1.12 Timeline for adopted, emerging, and future applications of AM.

In general, AM processes started to adapt to different sectors as early as 1990. Figure 1.12 shows this timeline and applications that have embraced AM technology.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, among AM processes, three classes of PBF, DED, and BJ, are integrated into mainstream metal manufacturing widely. PBF can include laser‐ and electron‐beam‐based processes where the heat source for DED can be laser, electron, arc, and plasma. The material delivery system in DED can be either powder‐fed or wire‐fed. As per the applications, these AM classes can be used in various applications depending on the size, complexity, and resolution of components. Figure 1.13 schematically shows these processes' applications based on the component size and accuracy/complexity associated with the component. As seen, for large‐size components, the powder‐fed and wire‐fed DED processes are the most applicable processes, where the printed part may not require high resolution with complex features. In contrast, PBF and BJ can be used for smaller metal parts with higher resolution and complexity. In contracts, it has to be noted that the density of parts produced by DED is almost perfect when in BJ, the density cannot be high. PBF is a middle process that can produce relatively large parts up to 50 cm with high resolution and high complexity using the current state of PBF technology in 2020.

Metal AM has a track record of providing innovative solutions leading to reduced lead time, faster design‐to‐market cycles, or production of previously impossible parts in many industrial sectors. Chief among them are medical, dental, aerospace, defense, energy, resources, and automotive industries. In the following, we will touch based upon the status of metal AM applications in different industrial sectors and review some of the state‐of‐the‐art applications of metal AM in each industry.

Figure 1.13 Most important metal AM processes versus part size, complexity, and resolution needed.