Читать книгу Metal Additive Manufacturing - Ehsan Toyserkani - Страница 26

One of the obvious applications of metal AM is in tooling and mold production for other industries such as medical, aerospace, and automotive (see Figure 1.8). Furthermore, AM can be used to fabricate other industrial parts such as machinery components, heat exchangers, engineered structures, etc. either for parts redesigned for AM or for low volume producing legacy parts of current designs. In the consumer products sector, the promise of mass customization drives the gradually increasing usage of metal AM in various consumer products such as decorative objects, jewelry, custom sports gear, and structures such as bicycle frames. The design freeform, material graded structures, lightweighting, and fast design‐to‐market cycle offered by AM are predicted to have revolutionary effects on the market of industrial and personal products.

Highly scalable wire arc DED systems have also shown the potential to make larger structures in one run. MX3D (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) has been working on an award‐winning smart bridge made from stainless steel, which will be placed on a canal in Amsterdam (Figure 1.19). Embedded with a network of sensors in collaboration with Alan Turing Institute (London, UK), this pedestrian bridge will collect structural data to help engineers measure the health of the structure under various environmental conditions in real time. This is a window to the future of urban planning and structural engineering world, as we are moving toward Internet of Things (IoT) smart cities with AM as one of the principal pillars of this movement realizing the physical aspect of the IoT [31].