ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING: THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING

Additive manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing method used to fabricate prototypes, tooling as well as functional products. Additive manufacturing helps us produce complex parts as single-unit objects, which was not possible with the traditional manufacturing methods. There are different types of additive-manufacturing technologies, including selective laser melting, laser-metal-deposition process, fused deposition modeling and electron-beam melting. All these additive-manufacturing technologies produce three-dimensional (3D) objects by adding materials layer after layer. A 3D object is built directly from a 3D computer-aided-design (CAD) model of the object. Additive manufacturing is a very promising method for the aerospace industry, in particular because of its ability to reduce the buy-to-fly ratio. This technology is the technology of the future because it is going to change the way products are designed and manufactured. In this research, various additive-manufacturing technologies are described in detail and some of the research works in this field are also presented. The future research directions are also highlighted.